Nowhere to Remain
by Carryon14
Summary: Obi-Wan was the perfect Jedi Knight: dignified, detached, possessing an almost courtly sense of propriety. But you would be wrong, if you thought he never loved - in secret, in his heart, he loved a love to move the stars. Sabe/Obi-Wan.
1. Prologue

A/N: Because Obi-Wan was human, too! And love stories are grand.

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**Disclaimer:** Really, don't own it. Just love it.

**Prologue**

_Everything conspires to silence us,_

_partly with shame,_

_partly with unspeakable hope._

- Rilke, Second Elegy

If the words of her first and most memorable teacher were to be believed, then there exists in the world an Order, a natural hierarchy that contains within it every living thing, that cascades down over all the articles of creation and weaves them together in a grand, cosmic narrative of purpose and destiny.

It was a long time ago, in the days of the old republic. On the core planet of Naboo, on a lovely summer's day the children of the state orphanage were led out from behind the high grey brick walls to go to the capital. The bus ride there was a spectacle of chattering and shrieking, with windows open and the new air pouring over like the wind weaves over the sea.

But, being orphans and by necessity better behaved than most children, they grew quiet as they proceeded down the white-marbled streets, and in the cool shadow of Theed's tall colonnades all fell silent. The children formed a ring around the sharp, tall shadow of their professor. Standard-issue maroon unifs – a few too short in the cuff or in the leg – stirred in the wind, while the long hair of the girls blew back in the high breeze of a medallion-gold day.

It was to be their first lesson in politics, in citizenship, and in obedience to a Law that was at once external to the individual and internal to the social organism. But at that time they only Professor Suo-Lan Kon, who at the age of twenty-seven had been banished from the higher circles of Coruscanti academia into the drudgery of the Naboovian state school system as the result of a few controversial papers. And indeed there was something in the tilt of his head that recalled the lean, hungry cats that patrolled the outlying mountains of the wilderness. But despair and intellectual frustration only made him more eloquent, and when he spoke to his miniature audience it was with the intensity of a man about to be struck dumb for all eternity.

To understand the truth of the state, Professor Kon said, one simply observed the working of the fountain. He waved his hand, as if he himself had, at that very moment, crafted the whole of it through his understanding, as if alone of all the world, he flung the light of the sun to illuminate that white-marbled, thousand-tiered fountain. The children squinted, and shifted their gaze under the glare of it; some had already lost interest, and were making faces at one another. Many had been here before, had stood at this very spot some years ago, had heard the same story told in a different tongue, by a different face. But it was another era, in a time when they still had parents, before the Pandemic.

The source of the fountain – he continued – where the water springs up, so very high up that it disappeared into the ether – that is like the source of the state's power. That is monarch, the water-spout, top-glimmering burst of spray. And see how the water then drifts, flows, steps gracefully down the many shell-like troughs like a lady descending in a grand ball gown. Each of those thousand tiers is capable of receiving a different cup of that life-water, each able to augment its flow in a singular, unique way, until the inspiration, the water itself – is transformed through the shape of its vessels into form, into action, into the creation of beauty and power and glory. The cycle completes at the very bottom of the pool where the water is charged, recycled and pumped through various hydraulic mechanisms, to spring out of the top once more.

The state gives, and we give back; the system fills the each trough, the singular empty cup that is each one of us, and we, flowing with _its _power, permit ourselves to be useful.

In hierarchy we find our use, in use lies our purpose. Through hierarchy, destiny; through purpose, harmony. Without this you wallow in turmoil; understand this, and you shall find peace. This he said, the sun blazing on his head while the children looked on in silence.

Even though she loved Professor Kon and often thought of his ideas of Universal Design, Sabé had to conclude as the years grew one into another that the grand moments of history, the moments of Destiny and Purpose had very little effect upon the making of her mind. It was the things unrecorded by history that impacted her, shaped her, and in some instances conspired to break her. For it seemed to Sabé a truth to say: in the small, insignificant, intervening moments, the ones rescued from history by virtue of their being forgotten, in them resided the whole of her life.

* * *

_Ten years later_

Captain Panaka was not a man known for his diplomacy, since pretty words were not his business on any sort day, good or bad. After an exhaustive journey across three provinces, with far too many abandoned leads, he had finally found the girl at this desolate little Abbey of the Sisters of Ailla in the town of Ranneth. His relief at seeing "NOVICE SABÉ VERUNA" in the register was incalculably greater, he thought, than even that of a parent finding her missing child after a decade's separation. His business, after all, was a matter of national security.

So he must be excused for the haste with which he flashed his badge at the attending Sister and charged into their morning reflections. And perhaps he might be pardoned his disregard of social niceties when he spotted the girl, and pointed at her, and said quite simply, and indeed very loudly –

"That's the one."

Though perhaps there was less excuse for what the Captain said next, which was something to the order of her losing ten pounds and acquiring a proper wig to cover up that ghastly shaved head, which, in the Captain's own opinion, was not a hairstyle any girl should adopt. She was a girl, after all, and this was Naboo.

The girl blinked at him. Even doing that she was the perfect replica of their new Queen, Shiraya bless Her Royal Highness.

"Out of the question," said Sister Mabela, who had been keeping watch at the door when the Captain invoked homeland security and proceeded to charge into the abbey. She had half-run after him all this way and only caught snippets of an elaborate plan involving body doubles and people getting shot during tense negotiations with the Nemodians. This conversation was taking place some minutes after the Captain's initial comment, as the other sisters had to be cleared out of the room, most of them looking scandalized that a man had all but burst in on their sanctuary. Only the novitiate was left, looking – understandably – befuddled.

"It is completely impossible," Sister Mabela continued, working herself into the vein of negation as her white eyebrows danced, "this novice is the only mechanic we have running the Abbey; as such she is irreplaceable. We can ill-afford to lose someone with her dedication to the order and her level of expertise with mechanical matters, especially now with the Trade Federation blockade. Is that not right, Novice Sabé? "

The girl opened her mouth before abruptly shutting it again.

"And your observance of silence is quite beside the point now, when the Queen's head of security is trying to take you away from us for good," the Sister snapped.

But the restoration of the novitiate's speech did not come fast enough to beat the Captain's frustrated expletive – which he had the good sense to cut short, as he was not entirely immune to the atmosphere of piety. The swallowed word, however, transformed itself into a dismissive, bristling motion in his shoulders, after which the Captain sent the Sister a look of utter condescension and incredulous contempt that ranked military officials reserved especially for uncooperative civilians.

But Sister Mabela had not risen to become second-in-line for Abbess for nothing. Thirty years of meditation practice, strict observance of precepts, and frequent dealings with recalcitrant, food-stealing novitiates had given her an intricate understanding of the human organism. This Captain Panaka was only proving to be a particularly ornery specimen. She drew herself to her full 5 foot 2 inches, and glared at the 6 foot plus man in uniform, while the sunlight caught on the bristle of her shorn white head and glinted in her grey eyes.

"I'm afraid I must insist, Captain Panaka; you must realize how preposterous your situation is – barging into our Abbey to recruit for the security detail of the queen? Surely there is another girl in the whole of Naboo who can fulfill the simple purpose of jumping in front of a bullet?"

The queen's security chief shook his head in flat denial. The determined set of his face usually frightened lower-ranked officials into their respective apologetic stances, but the old woman was had age on her side. He was not a man used to getting everything he wanted; being a fanatic it was often his lot. But the captain's passion for security detail also motivated him to fight tooth and nail – with a nun if he had to – to claim every inch of ground.

For the idea of a decoy was a stroke of complete genius; genius of a sort for which he was rarely capable, and he was sure that he only needed to get the girl in question for the plan to work out. In fact it will do better that _work out;_ he was convinced it would become a piece of strategic sleight-of-hand to surpass anything that Naboo security has seen since before the Long Peace.

And it was for this girl, this Sabé Veruna – a pandemic orphan, as it was the tradition to take the surname of the monarch when one had none of her own – that he had scoured the countryside.

He trained his lizard-like eyes on the girl, and felt that flash of recognition, of rightness, pass through him. She was the spitting image of the queen. Now if he could only get her to stand up straight, and stop that nervous gesture of her hands, and look him in the eye – what glory that would be.

"Sister Mabela," Captain Panaka said, "For reasons which I had so patiently explained to you already, I'm afraid I won't find another girl in the whole of Naboo, or even in all the core planets combined, who will do."

He pulled out a holograph of Queen Amidala from his breast pocket – he had kept it there day and night like a talisman on this long, potentially career-ruining search – and offered it to the novice. She took it with steady fingers, and astonishment came into her face as she studied the picture. Arching her eyebrows, she passed the holograph to Siste Mabela, as if to get her assurance that this in fact was the face of their Queen.

They didn't watch the holonet here, he realized with a shock. It was an abbey after all, but did they have to be so disconnected?

"Queen Amidala has been office for less than a month," The captain explained, and then exaggerated – "and there have already been death threats. I must guarantee her safety, and you would be a perfect double. I would train you in anything you need to know to protect yourself, provide for your every need for as long as the Queen is in office - if you come with me to Theed Palace."

The girl said nothing.

"Well, Sister Mabela, I am certain that some agreement could be reached between us," Panaka plowed on, "Her Royal Highness commands vast resources, and though I understand completely your objections to losing your best mechanic –"

" – and a fine Novice in the Order," interjected Sister Mabela.

" – and a wonderful Novice, of course," Panaka agreed, though it sounded rather insipid when he said it, "But through her service to the queen this girl will fulfill her debt to all Naboo. She will serve the greater good, to repay all that the state has done for her. At the end of it she may return to again to serve the gods at this Abbey – "

Sister Mabela rolled her eyes toward heaven, "We are not a theistic order, Captain, much less a pantheistic one. We serve no gods here but what gods one might find in the luminous mind –"

"Yes of course," as the Captain refrained from some eye-rolling of his own, "my abject apologies, Sister, but I am not very familiar with your order. And to continue in our discussion – the novice will only be needed for four years, and in the meantime I am certain that a professional engineer will be sent to you for any problems you might experience with the generator, free of charge."

"Captain Panaka?" the novitiate spoke before the bargaining for her person could take too vulgar a turn. Though her voice was hoarse from long disuse (how long was this vow of silence, he wondered – Months? Years?), the captain could distill in it something resembling the bell-like tones of the Queen.

The novice Sabé pulled her eyes away from the holograph, and made her voice steady to say, in the composed way that was the only proper way of the Sisters, "Captain, I accept your offer. I will go with you to serve the Queen Amidala for as long as she maintains her Majority."

And to the Sister, whose face was a strange mix of disappointment and expectation, she said, "I will return after I have served the Queen, Sister Mabela," and then, "this must be one of those fate things they talk about. Better to go along than avoid it, wouldn't you say?"

For that she received only a repressive look, for Sister Mabela was one who believed very much in a Universal Design, while Novice Sabé had been (when she still possessed her voice) one of its most vocal skeptics. Nonetheless, with a good dash of her long-acquired patience and practiced calm Sister Mabela came before Sabé and placed her thin, papery hands upon Sabé's temples, and leaned up to press a dry kiss on her forehead.

"I do not know such things, Novice," she said, "but we shall keep you in our prayers for as long as you are gone."

"I shall return, Sister."

"May it be so," the older woman smiled.

"Peace be with you, then," Sabé said, with a bow.

"And with you."

Thus Sabé would go, for the first time in her life, into the service of another.

The captain was pressed for time, and waited outside while Sabé collected her things. Her belongings all fit in an old canvas satchel from the Orphanage. Sisters Thessa and Kalare came in person for goodbyes. A quiet word, a smile, the offering of a pressed flower and a book. Their very practice was silence, and simplicity, thus at the end she had few things to take up the mantle of a thousand memories. It was a blessing, therefore, that the nature of her mind was not like most minds of young people, that only register the fire and flash. Indeed, she could hear something – if only faintly – of the deep pulsing of the human heart beneath them. This memory of the two quiet, grey-eyed women, would sustain her in years to come, in future joys and hardships.

But for the moment, on the steps of the abbey two figures stood poised in the stillness before a great journey. The once-novice had shed her habit and donned a plain dress of green cotton. The hot air of summer stirred the stubbles of her shorn head, and she looked about her at this end of her internment, and then glanced to the tall dark man sweating heavily in his leathers beside her.

He put out a hand to help her into the side seat of the landspeeder, and they began their crossing under the blue and golden skies of perfect summer.


	2. Setting to Order

**A/N: **Thanks for your reviews!

**Disclaimer**: Can bald Sabé be mine? No? Alright. None of it are mine!

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**Chapter 1: Setting to Order**

_And we. turned not toward the Open_

_but to the stuff of our lives._

_It drowns us. We set it in order._

_It falls apart._

- Rilke, Eighth Elegy

In the days when she was novice to the Order of Ailla (or served the gods, as Captain Panaka might say ), long before the sun made its ascent into the wide sky over Ranneth, Sister Kalare would have gone around the quarters with the wooden bell, chanting the Prayer of Great Compassion for morning wake-up. Then from the blue shadows of their cells the sisters and novitiates of the abbey would emerge, quiet steps padding down the wood planks of the hallway to their ablutions. Then into the hall, where the Abbess had already began the Sitting; and so the day proceeded with meditation, prostrations, and prayers until the sun filtered through the upper east window. Breakfast followed; a brief affair of oats and honey and fresh fruit if the season was right.

The rest of the morning was spent in study of scripture or in further meditation. Sabé and the two other novices had begun their term with a year's long observance of silence to cultivate patience and insight into the true use of speech. Mornings for them were a time of great mental activity, for committing the teachings to memory and for recording her reflections in the year's journal. Midday meal was served at half past noon, and the afternoon was spent in the upkeep of the monastery, during which Sabé was apprenticed to Sister Thessa, who at eighty-seven standard years old, was still in charge of fixing the Abbey's ever-growing number of malfunctioning machines. Around 6 pm, a light evening fare for those who wished it (Sisters who observed stricter vows did not partake of dinner), then evening prayers, and bedtime promptly at 10 pm, if not before. And this was so in all the days that preceded the first.

Handmaiden training proved a vastly different experience. After a day-long journey via the hovercraft Sabé was woken from her nap and escorted into an unremarkable building in the outskirts of the Theed. After a few excited words to the matron at the door Captain Panaka motioned for her to follow him through the gate – she tried to rub the sleep from her eyes – and past the small courtyard, then it was down a maze of bluish hallways and solid metal doors until they came to a small gymnasium. Shouts and the slap of bodies against mats echoed through the room, and Sabé saw that three pairs of girls were training in hand-to-hand combat at the far end.

The wooden floor shone a waxed yellow, and the mats were brilliant blue. Sabé, too long used to the Abbey, couldn't help but wonder who it was in charge of buffing the gym floor until it shone, and how long it must take. The overhead lights were very bright.

The first girl who noticed their appearance let her guard down for a second. This allowed her taller, blond opponent to land a kick directly at her solar plexus. The shorter one emitted what could only be termed a squeak, and fell hard on the floor.

Sabé winced, and the thought occurred to her – rather dimly but growing in apprehension – that she would also have to train in hand-to-hand combat.

"Handmaiden Saché," the Captain called, advancing on the group, "you'll have to learn to focus on you closest opponent at all times, or any change in the environment is going to throw you, as Handmaiden Eirtaé has so kindly demonstrated for us. But as this is a training module, Eirtaé, let us save the more damaging maneuvers for someone who is not on our side, hm?"

"Sorry Captain," said Eirtaé, but Sabé saw the little smirk playing at the corner of her mouth as she held out her hand to the brown, curly-haired Saché.

"I was just that happy to see you back, Captain," quipped Saché, getting up on her own and throwing her blond companion a look of utter disgust, "it's been far too long since we've felt your gentle guidance."

The four girls had assembled, by order of height. They looked at Sabé curiously, but as she was hooded they abandoned the effort after a cursory glance and focused their attention back on Panaka.

"And I see that these two weeks of training hasn't impelled you to control your tongue any better. Rabé," he addressed another of the girls, who Sabé distinguished by her high cheekbones and rather large ears, "have they been like this the whole time?"

The handmaiden replied, "We have all been very well, Captain. It is good to have you back."

"See that, Saché? You'd do well to learn from Rabé." Panaka said.

Saché gave a long suffering sigh.

"Handmaidens, I would like you to meet our new queen."

He motioned for Sabé to show her face, which she did, lifting up her head and the eyes of the girls grew round.

One of them said quite naively, dipping in a courtesy, "Your Royal Highness."

Saché rolled her eyes, "This is not the queen, Yané. It's the decoy that the Captain's been so keen on. Her Royal Highness is at least an inch shorter. And her eyes aren't hazel, they're brown."

"And she has hair," Eirtaé exclaimed, pulling off the hood as the girls gave a collective gasp, "For Shiraya's sake, Captain, where did you find her?"

"Where are you manners?" said Rabé with a repressive frown, but to Sabé she gave a smile, and a hand to shake, "my name is Rabé. What is yours?"

And while at repose her features were not exceptional, now kindness lit up her face, made it open and beautiful.

"I am Sabé."

As the rest of the girls duly introduced themselves while Captain Panaka refrained himself from tapping his foot. There was much to be done in a short amount of time. The Captain was glad to see that at least the girl would find an ally, or a protector in Rabé. The others all talked back far too much for his liking. Saché was especially strident, she had a tongue sharper than a guillotine; Eirtaé thought herself above them all (which she was, being a Lady and all); Yané could really be a bit dim-witted at times, but Rabé had something of gentleness in her. And this new girl, the decoy, he had been so utterly focused on her physical resemblance to the queen that her mind was still a mystery to him.

The Captain rubbed his hands together. It's been a month since the Queen's coronation and the Trade Federation was getting more unreasonable by the day. Calculations streamed through his head – physical conditioning itself will take three weeks to get her up to par, which meant he will have to cram in the decoy training in the middle of that.

Quickly he wrapped up the meet-and-greet. There were still training modules to complete that very evening, and he had on hand – oh by the gods – a young nun who will have to be divested of all her pacifist conditioning in a very short amount of time.

* * *

From early childhood Padmé Naberrie had known the precise effect that face of a pretty woman may have on a man. Her mother was exceptionally beautiful, and in general the males who came within her gravitational field had - with very few exceptions - turned into illogical, blubbering idiots.

Padmé herself had been a pretty child, but not beautiful or much of anything out of the ordinary. Bright eyed, dark haired, with skin translucent that any signs of a blush showed clear through – she was the apple of her parents' eye, but of no more than passing interest to strangers. Until her twelfth year - then suddenly the dark of night brought about an astonishing transformation. One day she woke and in the street faces turned to hers when she passed; every service was suddenly provided with more alacrity when she went about her business in town, and while she had never been short of friends at school, it was easier now to call herself friend to hundreds with little more effort than a smile, and a gesture of inclusion.

Many a girl would have basked in it. Beauty was a virtue, after all; and no matter how enlightened the society and civilization became, there was no denying the natural pull of a lovely faceBut luckily for Padmé, her ambitions and her dreams had been long cemented before the onset of her beauty. Indeed it was as if her loveliness was only the long-anticipated final ingredient to complete the picture of her allure, as if it was fated for her to be beautiful. And indeed, her beauty, when coupled with her truly prodigious intelligence, together launched (catapulted, really) Padmé into her political career. And oh, what a brilliant career it has been.

The discovery of Sabé was quite a surprise. The differences between herself and the Decoy were glaring, of course, when the individual habits of years was upon them, and they used their own facial, verbal, physical expressions. Padmé was usually an animated talker, she tended to gesticulate wildly when excited; Sabé on the other hand rarely talked at all in her first few days, and went around with a blank face most of the time. Her decoy had been a nun for the last three years, for Shiraya's sake.

But perhaps most strange to Padmé of all was that her decoy had absolutely no idea how to use her beauty. What Padmé had come to understand intuitively had to be rather painstakingly spelled out to her decoy, namely, that Beauty was not only in the natural arrangement of the face, but also in its expressions. For Padmé, her normal modes of speech and emotion tended to evoke the most attractive of those expressions, no matter what she did. Sabé, on the other hand had to be taught almost the whole range of looks. Hours had to be spent in front of the mirror to perfect the expressions, to which Beauty was not sacrificed and emotion was clearly conveyed, producing Charming Coquetry (for easily influenced elder politicians, mostly male), Ice Cold Aloofness (for bothersome courtiers, especially those who come courting, the perverts), Regal Distance (especially on public occasions when photographs might be taken), Earth-Motherly Generosity (whenever in the presence of children, to signify a difference in station, especially if the children were not so apart in age), and the like.

Smiling – with all the teeth shown and the corners of the eyes crinkled-like – was prohibited, as was boisterous laughter; though after day one Padmé hadn't seen her decoy smile, or laugh.

For the next few weeks, Padmé would take care of state business during the morning, and flew in to the training facility in the afternoon for practice. Evenings she spent back at the Palace, where, thank the gods, the beds were so much more comfortable, and there she stayed up late and read reports and prepared for further indignation from the Trade Federation.

The first four days of combat training were rather harsh on the Decoy. The precepts practiced by an ordained nun was very different from the philosophy espoused by Captain Panaka, which involved a lot more punching, hitting, kicking, and running away if attacked – though the idea of the decoy was really to stick around while the real queen ran, so she would have to be rather good at the fighting.

Days one through four consisted almost exclusively of her decoy getting kicked, punched, sometimes flying a little through the air before landing painfully on the mat. Padmé generally went easy on her, as did Rabé, but Eirtaé was the kind to believe in tough love, and Yané and Saché hadn't gotten perfected their control yet, and did the worst damage purely by accident.

But she never complained; not within Padmé's hearing anyway, though there was a distinct possibility that the training regimen was so exhausting that anything but sleeping was a waste of breath afterward. Padmé thought that if any of the other handmaidens were to be put through the same regimen they would not have done so gracefully, or silently.

There was also the speech training, the familiarization with Padmé's carriage, her walk, and mannerism, which they completed later in the afternoon, while the other handmaidens had some time off, or trained on the more domestic aspects of their service to the Queen. And here, aside from teaching Sabé how to use her looks, another set of philosophies had to be implemented, but at least these were easy to explain.

"There is no time when you don't give a damn about politics," Padmé thought she summed it up quite nicely there, "Every word matters, and every gesture. Because there is no time when you are not being observed. There is no time when you are not Queen."

Sabé learned quickly; and having a literary she bent mastered the speech patterns as well as a host of court phrases – especially the ones designed to stall so Padmé could make some sort of a hand signal to indicate her opinion, or rather, command on the matter.

On the first day of week two, the afternoon began with combat practice with the usual six-foot bamboo pole, intended to simulate the tall arm of wall torches in the palace which are, in fact, detachable for the purposes of defense, though why any one wouldn't rather just use a blaster was beyond Padmé's guess. Panaka had woken the handmaidens early that morning; each had about four hour's sleep since the evening before. All morning he had them run the obstacle course outside. And as the afternoon got on Padmé could see the strain wearing at the girls. Eirtaé looked especially murderous, and even Rabé did not have her usual smile. Glancing over at Sabé, however, Padmé saw that her decoy looked positively ill. Her face was flushed, red stood high on either cheek, and she was sweating even before practice began. She shot a look at Panaka, but he ignored her. Practice under all conditions, was his motto; they must be ready under any circumstances.

Her decoy was fighting tired, and the first round Padmé had gone easy on her, but even so Sabé could barely bring her arms to block towards the end. Her second round with Rabé was only worse. Padmé watched from the corner of her eyes, and tried to shout out a warning even as Rabé's parry caught Sabé full on the sternum. Sabé stumbled backwards, swayed as she tried to right herself and fell face-first onto the mat. After a second Rabé was on the ground, shaking Sabé gently, the decoy had raised herself to her elbows and tried vigorously to shake her off. Then Sabé's shoulders heaved, and she sprinted out of the room.

"Back to your positions," roared Captain Panaka, "Rabé, go see to Handmaiden Sabé. Everyone else, this is a combat training, I want to see those sticks back in your hands, and everyone fighting!"

But before Rabé had even gotten to the door of the gymnasium, Sabé had returned. She was rubbing the spot on her chest where Rabé had hit her, but other than that she looked completely better. The greenish pallor gone, as were the sunken eyes and the hunched walk. She was even standing a couple of inches taller. The training pole sat lightly in her hand as she picked it up, twirling it experimentally. The sickness had disappeared in an instant.

Sparring resumed, this time with Sabé going against Eirtaé. And from the corner of her eye Padmé was astonished to note that Sabé was holding her own – more than holding her own, in fact.

"Handmaiden!" This time it was Panaka who yelled, and the rest of them dropped their sticks in time to see Sabé complete a perfect spin about five feet in the air to avoid one of Eirtaé's high arching sweeps. Padmé knew the blond handmaiden's technique; she had felt its blow on more than one occasion. Eirtaé used it because it was so hard to avoid its trajectory; the only way to get out was to roll under, and try to cut out Eirtaé's legs from under her. that situation usually ended in the taller handmaiden either kicking, or striking from above, since she had the higher ground. But apparently there was another, better way to do it.

Sabé landed silently, with almost inhuman grace. She twisted the staff in an elaborate, dizzying figure, and before the could blink, two sharp cracks sounded as Eirtaé's stick clattered out of her hands, leaving only Sabé, her pole held horizontal to her opponent's chest.

"My stars," said Saché, who had been fighting Yané.

"How did you do that?" Eirtaé asked incredulously.

"Well," Sabé said, barely breathing hard, "I guess I finally found my knack for it."

* * *

The same strange leap repeated itself later that afternoon, at their speech training. Sabé was asked to deliver a speech that Padmé had given during her coronation, the idea being that she could be shown the video of it afterwards and compare her performance to the real thing. The handmaiden had looked over the speech, and turning her hazel eyes on Padmé, asked what it was that she was looking at, when she talked that day.

"The fountain," Padmé said, remembering, "and the spray of the falls behind them, in the distance."

"Was it sunny outside?"

"There were moments of sun," Padmé replied, "but mostly the clouds were moving fast, with the wind."

Sabé nodded.

She closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them, she was no longer Sabé Veruna, the plague orphan, rehearsing in a training compound in front of the skeptical audience of Captain Panaka and Padmé. She was Queen Amidala, addressing the citizens of Naboo on the day of her coronation.

Five seconds in, Padmé was stunned. Five minutes in, she was flabbergasted. The expression of Panaka's face told a similar story. Her decoy was giving the speech as she herself wished to give it – better, in fact, than she had given it. Every inflection was a thing Padmé had worked on, for hours, in the space of her chamber. For the role of the Queen was an act for her as well, yet it seemed now that the act came much more easily to the Decoy, than even to the Queen herself. All of a sudden it the role took on the girl standing before her, wearing her combat-training uniform as if it were the royal regalia, holding her head high in defiance of any challenge.

"Well," said Captain Panaka to silent room after Sabé had finished, "I think you're ready."


	3. Dissolve in Air

A/N: please read and review!

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**Chapter 2: Dissolve in Air**

_O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:_

_new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart..._

_alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space_

_we dissolve into, taste of us then?_

- Rilke, Second Elegy

**Training Compound, Theed**

"Sabé, You're not going out?"

Handmaiden Sabé looked up from her book. It was their first sunny day in weeks and she was sitting on the windowsill, turning the pages of an old treatise she had brought from the Abbey, more for the comfort of the yellowing pages than for any devotional feelings. The Captain had given them the day off, their first in three weeks, and told them to go and get what silliness out their system as was necessary to serve the queen in the ensuing days. For the situation with the Trade Federation had come to a head; everyone who knew of the matter was on tenterhooks awaiting some outbreak. Intergalactic ambassadors had apparently been deployed to mediate the situation, and it seemed that the endurance of Naboo's Long Peace rested on whether they could persuade the Federation into some semblance of sanity. But the weather, of course, had no qualms of adhering to the tense political situation, and out of the window the high-stacked clouds sailed through blue sky like ships in the old tales, billowing and carefree.

"I said, you're not going anywhere, even on this, our last day of freedom?" It was Saché, speaking from the dark of the doorway. She had changed from the yellow-striped maroon unif to a dark purple dress; her eyes drifted from the half-open book, to the lengthening stubble on Sabé's head.

Sabé tried not to look too surprised. Of the handmaidens she mostly spoke with Rabé, though she knew Saché a little, peripherally through sparring sessions and the weapons training. She had no energy for the eight hours left in their day to do much more than shower and sleep. The eldest of the handmaidens was dead-on with a gun but rubbish after five minutes at hand-to-hand combat. Anything that came out of her mouth was utter truth to herself; it was a personality that Sabé at times admired, and at times found completely exasperating.

"Out? Like into the yard?" Sabé looked out her window, which gave an utterly uninspiring view of a dilapidated practice field where the engineers engaged in basketball for the under-skilled, "I wasn't pining for that. Where are you going?"

"Rabé and I thought we'd go wander about in Theed, it's the Harvest Festival," Saché replied, stepping gingerly into the room. The other handmaidens had the same eight by eleven cell with its standard bed, closet, chair, and desk. Sabé had done a little rearranging, putting the chair nearer the door and the rug and pillow (which served her for meditation) underneath the windowsill.

"It's really clean in here," Saché said, wrinkling her nose, "another one of your nun habits?"

Sabé raised an eyebrow.

"Well," Saché continued, "Rabé and I were thinking that you might want to come with us to Theed, and maybe show us your favorite hangout, if you want, that is. We'll be going in ten minutes."

Saché had never met a nun before, and didn't really know what to make of it. The whole idea of cloistering oneself, confined to one little part of the earth when there was a whole galaxy waiting just beyond the limits of the sky – it was almost inconceivable. In fact it had taken the better part of a week just to get used to the shorn head on their new decoy; because she looked so like their new queen, but then didn't look much like either a boy or a girl. In Naboo a woman's hair was a foremost asset to her beauty; Saché, for one, would never do something so ridiculous with her own copper-brown locks.

But as their decoy hadn't tried to convert her in their three weeks together – hadn't handed her any literature or tried to pray over the dinner table, Saché thought she might not be so bad. Besides, Saché had knocked her flat on her back three times during the first week of training (which means the other handmaidens did much worse), so there was a little grudging respect mixed in there, too. So this afternoon, when Rabé said Saché should make friends with Sabé, and made her really cute gnoroop face which she used only under extreme duress as a tool of persuasion, Saché had said to-hell-with-it, and went to ask Silent Sister to Theed with them.

Haldron drove the three of them to the city limits in a civilian type speeder. The man was sick in love with Rabé and would have done anything great and terrible for her, which in reality was very useful for getting rides to the city. So Rabé sat up front with Haldron and flirted shamelessly while Saché was stuck in the back with Sabé. Her Royal Baldness wore a great maroon cloak to cover up her head, and was looking at the approaching skyline of Theed with such open-mouthed wonder that it was all Saché could do not to comment on it.

"I think I _have_ been here before," Sabé said after a while, narrowing her eyes at the great domes on the horizon "a very long time ago."

"That's reasonable," Saché said, "all school aged children have to visit the capital at least once, even the state orphanage takes their kids here every few years."

"That must be it," Sabé looked over at Saché, "How did you know that – about the orphanage, I mean?"

"I was there for two years after the pandemic, until I could get a position working in the Palace," Saché said, "it was a place to stay while I finished secondary school. I remember them taking all of us out and showing us around the giant fountain, complete with grand speeches and whatever."

"With Professor Kon," Sabé supplied, "the radical exile from Coruscant. I remember him."

Saché looked over at the decoy.

"You were there too?"

"I was there for six years."

Something passed between them then, something diffcult to put into words, but underscored by the knowledge of how easily black emptiness blooms in the middle of a full life, like a drop if ink in water staining everything grey. Small questions were asked, to build that frail orphans' bond. The conversation took them all the way to the Triumphal Arch, in the heart of Theed.

Haldron pulled the hovercraft to a stop, and the girls descended. Rabé received a kiss on the hand, at which she blushed prettily. The Arch soared over a wide promenade, interspersed with blocks of greenery and glittering fountains. Even the recent blockade could not abate the enjoyment of a fine autumn day. Children's kites tangled in the air, and street vendors peddled their wares around the base of the great stone pillars. As the good captain had been persuaded to letting them have a little of their earnings before the end of the month, Rabé and Saché each spent some of theirs on a glass of Naboo's famed blossom wine, which was the featured product of the Harvest Festival. And Sabé, for whom it was really to early to break that monastic precept, settled for a small bag of candy.

A little flushed, Rabé submitted to their teasing about Haldron with good grace and a pert shake of her head. She had no intentions of marrying him, she confided, the boy was too stuffy, head-in-a-box, and she had already fixed her eye quite steadily on another _man_ whose name she would not divulge at the moment. This sent Saché into a tirade on the dangers as well as the insipidity of the male species, during which she gave accounts of her experiences with several of the palace guards, cooks, engineers as evidence.

They descended into the bustle of the merchant districts surrounding the Palace. The stalls of the Water Sector filled the air with tinkling wares and raised voices – male and female, human and alien – wrangling as hagglers perused over crafts and delicacies, and tried to convinced the stallkeepers, in a mix of Galactic Basic and the various dialects of Naboo, that what they were selling should really come at a much cheaper price.

"It's emptier than last year," Rabé said.

People milled about them; Sabé didn't remember ever seeing so many in one place before. Yet the street was not crowded; the vendors had time and patience to talk with each patron in succession, and there were unclaimed stalls along either side of the street, where bad business must have led some to retire early.

Rabé had lived in Theed all her life; her father was a physician here and her mother managed his private practice. She was the third of five children; her two elder brothers both worked in the Theed hospital, and her younger sisters intended to follow what has grown to be a family tradition. But Rabé's passion was for literature, and wanted to teach or be a writer – though she also was an apt hand at basic emergency healing (and, as it turned out, an excellent eye for arranging hair). Panaka had recruited her after meeting her at the scene of a landspeeder crash, where she, long immune to the sight of broken bones and bleeding bodies, was efficiently dispatching dumbfounded adults to find help.

Saché took up the rest of the conversation by relating her less-than friendly run-in with Captain Panaka when she exposed one of his personal underlings with his hand in the government till. "He doesn't keep me around because he likes me, if you can't tell," Saché said, "he pays me so I don't go blabbing other people about the underhanded way he sometimes goes about carrying out his plans, and getting his people together."

Rabé laughed, "He keeps you around because he's scared of those hunches you get that turn out to be absolutely true, but is more scared of what you'll do with them if he's not there to listen in."

"It's common knowledge," Rabé explained to Sabé, "that Saché can tell a lie when it's said, as plain as day. And also that she just wakes up some mornings and can tell exactly what's going to happen that day, even in a faraway country."

"Stop it, Rabé," Saché snapped, "you make me sound like some weirdo psychic."

"Telepath, my dear, is what the civilized people call it nowadays."

"I am not a telepath!"

Sabé, sensing danger, quickly asked to see the Virdugo Plunge, and the topic was dropped as they set out for the falls to the south.

Nightfall found them worn out and happy. Saché hadn't bought a thing, but Sabé had gotten a miniature model of Theed that could zoom in over all the parts of the city, and Rabé was laden with gifts for her family for the coming holidays.

A phone call to the dutiful Haldron was dispatched, and his speedy arrival much lauded as the girls arranged themselves and Rabé's purchases in the confines of his speeder. For the first time in her life Sabé was surrounded by the voices of the young, and the exclamations of a successful shopping expedition, and the complaints of justifiable weariness. And the sound of it stirred at the corners of her memory, as of something barely recalled in the deeps of her mind, when another voice had spoke, as Rabé and Saché did now, of flowers and oranges and a good shop for blossom wine. Perhaps, she thought, her mother had done as she did now, wandering the capitol in her youth.

The hovercar maneuvered slowly out of the curvilinear roads of Theed and picked up speed at the edge of the country. Night drew on about them like wine settling and turning dark in the air. In the front seat Haldron put his arm around Rabé.

Saché gave a little snore from her darkened corner, and Sabé was just settling into the feel of smooth wind over the hover car and the receding city lights, when with a choked sputter and a flurry of alarm lights signaled brought them to a stop.

As in the aftermath of all vehicle malfunctions, amidst female protestations the lone male of the party sprang with alacrity to the side of his injured machine. Haldron West was a proud – if new - member of the third engineering corps of the Theed army, he was ready at all times with a flash light and his all-purpose Index for the repair of all known classes of mechanic fixtures in the universe. And so he opened the hood of the vehicle, stood with the former in his mouth and was consulting the latter for the make of his particular vehicle when he saw that one of Rabé's companions – the bald girl – had emerged from the car, and was looking over his shoulder with a thoughtful frown.

"The engine light's on, it means there's some problem in here," he explained to the female passenger, who though she looked very calm was probably having inner hysterics as all females do when machines break down. He wondered if maybe she could be trusted to have the presence of mind to hold his flashlight for him while he consulted his Index.

But she said, "May I take a look?" And he realized that she was one of the helpful female who stuck their noses in even where it had no place being. But as he was brought up in a civilized family by a military father who insisted on good manners under all circumstances, especially to females, Haldron stepped aside and let her knock herself out.

And to his everlasting astonishment, the girl put back her hood, laid a finger on his car, and _hummed_. Haldron could not have been more taken aback if she had whistled, spun, grew ear flaps and turned into a Gungan.

Instead she had closed her eyes, and in fact was humming with a look of great concentration, gradually changing pitch, the tune of her voice falling ever lower and lower while a frown notched itself in her brow. Then she stopped and kept the tone steady, and then even Haldron felt a strange rightness, a peripheral buzzing on his consciousness, as if the car and the night were all vibrating to the same note, and each atom in his own body were falling into sync –

And then she stopped.

The sounds of the night reasserted themselves, and Haldron shook his head to get rid of the strange, lightheaded sensation.

The girl took her hand off of the metal hull of his landspeeder, and said, "there's just a rock jammed in the left repulsor lift. The light registered that the central control wasn't getting to the back and thought it was a problem with the wiring, but it's nothing serious."

Before Haldron could close his mouth she had gone to the rear of the speeder, and instructed him to make sure the landspeeder was in idle.

A few spins, a kick, and a round stone dropped out onto the ground with a click. It was only a little noise in the night, but to Haldron it was deafening. The girl picked it up, and put it in her pocket, and climbed back into the speeder.

This was all a bit too fast and fantastical for the comprehension of Haldron West, engineer third class but top of his year at the Theed Academy in the division of Mechanical repairs. For a moment he considered continuing his perusal of the engine, but then realized his mouth was still open, and Rabé – and Saché, too – had been watching from the beginning of this affair, and decided that damage control must be applied, and to not look too stupid he will have to concede his momentary stupidity.

The landspeeder started when he turned the ignition, and ran light and swift as if there had never been a problem.

* * *

**Royal Palace, Theed**

**Five days later**

Second watch had been called in the Theed Palace, and Sabé was moving to dim the night light in her chamber when there was a scratch at her door.

"Saché?"

The handmaiden put a finger to her lips, and tiptoed into the room. She gestured to the door that led to the ajoining chamber, and whispered, "is Padmé asleep?"

The handmaidens had been transferred from the compound to the palace four days ago, their training in combat, defense, and small weapons deemed sufficient by Captain Panaka. They now lived in the quarters of the palace personnel, all of them except Sabé, who slept the chamber adjoining the Queen's. They had been switching and perfecting the decoy's act for the last four days, even during audiences and small negotiations, so Sabé might learn about the matters of state and also communicate with Padmé via hand signals.

Tomorrow was the day that the galactic ambassadors were to finish their negotiations, and Sabé would present as the queen from beginning to the end of the day, as no news of reconciliation had come from the Trade Federation, or were expected to.

"Asleep since half past the first watch; we don't need to whisper," Sabé told Saché, her lip quirking, "The queen sleeps the sleep of the just."

"This place is so much nicer than mine," Saché said, a corner of her lip curling in half-indignation as she surveyed the tall dome of chamber. Deep mahogany chairs flanked a wide fireplace, soft rugs engulfed the feet, and the bed was wide enough to put five across. Tones of gold and brown wove through the threads of the comforter, and were echoed in the lamp shades and the elegant pictures that hung off the walls, and even the wainscoting that crisscrossed the ceiling had tones of gold in the paint.

"Perks of being the walking target, Saché. Just know you're in a room I'm buying with my life," Sabé quipped, "Sit down, won't you?"

"Don't see why you have to do that when there's so many chairs about the place" Saché said, making a face at Sabé who was crosslegged on the floor, "And most people can't twist their legs into that position, you know".

Nonetheless she made to get a cushion from the bed. But the usual gleam of irony was missing from Saché's eyes, and the almost-perpetual smirk that hung off the corner of her mouth when she was ready to make some snide remark was smoothed out. For the first time since she's known her, Sabé saw Saché look completely and utterly serious.

But as it was, Saché didn't seem too eager to speak, and silence wove its web a little while in the room as she played with the ends of her hair, untying and braiding it again. Saché's hair was long and rich. It hung off one shoulder in a thick braid, and came down almost to her knees; threads of copper wove through the deep brown cable and shone wetly in the light.

"You know how – Sabé- how you have a knack, with machines and the like?" Saché began, after a couple minutes had passed.

"A knack?"

"A skill, like you just know how they work without ever having gone to school and trained for it – like that idiot Haldron – well you've got one, with landspeeders at least, right?"

"Haldron is not an idiot," Sabé protested, "and yes, I am good with machines."

The topic hadn't come up once since their little adventure. Sabé expected that Haldron was too embarrassed to bring it up, and that the other girls were not familiar enough with the way other people fix machines to know what looked like an abnormal procedure.

"It's more than that and you know it," Saché said, with a glare.

"Alright, alright. So it's a little more than that."

"I have a knack too," Saché said. "it's hard to explain– but I just know things, sometimes. Usually little ones, like when someone's lying. Or where things are when I didn't put them there – like right now the hairbrush they gave you, which you're not using, is in that desk over there, third drawer on the right."

Sabé blinked, "Rabé was telling the truth. You are a telepath?"

Saché gave a long-suffering sigh, "No, dimwit; telepathy is the ability to read minds, and I'm very happy I didn't get saddled with that. Like I said, I just know things, very particular things for no reason at. And other times, I get strong feelings about what's going to happen in the future."

Sabé frowned.

"I know. The future is not certain; there's is no fate set in stone yada yada. That's why my foretelling is completely erratic. Most days I can't even tell what the weather is going to be tomorrow. But there are some things set in motion that are irretrievable, done by people whose greed makes them predictable, like cogs in a cosmic machine. That is when my knack picks up on it."

"Does Captain Panaka know that you have this… knack?" Sabé asked.

"Are you kidding?" Saché gave a low laugh, "I wasn't lying when I told you it's the only reason he keeps me around. Every evening and morning it's _Saché, have you seen anything? _But when I do have something to tell him the man's so asleep he'd probably kill me if I tried to wake him up now –"

"It's happening tomorrow, Sabé," she said, "I saw it only vaguely, but things are coming to a head. There is going to be some kind of attempt on the capital tomorrow – maybe even on Padmé – and you all will have to run. Panaka won't be taking me or Yané when it happens. We are not good enough at defense to even take care of ourselves."

She stopped Sabé's protests with a reminder that the decoy will be in plenty more danger than a handmaiden who can blend easily into the populated capital.

"I'll take care of Yané, don't worry. She can be dimmer than you sometimes. I came to tell you because I figured you'd want to be prepared. Drink some strong tea tomorrow morning and don't forget to carry the blasters. Also, so I could say farewell."

"Saché. Now you are scaring me."

"I'm not even a quarter melodramatic today," Saché made a face.

"But all this talk of goodbye –"

"I'm not talking of goodbye," Saché smiled, "I said farewell, until our next meeting, when I expect a nice, fat package to say you missed me."

Sabé gave her friend a set of beads from the abbey, and when religion-shy Saché protested Sabé told her that she might wear it like a bracelet and accept it out of vanity, if not in sentiment. This was followed by some grumbling, though with an undercurrent of appreciation, and the exchange of gifts was complete.

The girls embraced and swallowed their uncertainties. The time was for action, not regret. Sabé, for her part, had little practice in voicing affection. And as for Saché, she left unsaid a shade of her vision, a shadow cast over it looming and all-pervasive, for she saw many goodbyes for her friend Sabé. But not every vision was a truth, and not every revelation a good, Saché thought, closing the door.

_The intervening time had been recorded exhaustively in the history books, telling of how five days after the new-trained handmaidens took their rooms in the domed walls of the Theed Palace, Naboo's negotiations with the Trade Federation failed, and the capital was invaded, bringing an end to the Hundred Year peace. The girl-queen Amidala and her closest handmaidens, as well as her securities chief had been whisked out of the grasp of imminent doom by the Jedi Ambassadors Qui-Gon Jinn and his Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi, who themselves had barely escaped death in the negotiation chambers of the Trade Federation. Fighting their way through the guards the party commandeered the Nubian Royal Starship, but before making their jump to hyperspace, they were attacked and their hyperdrive destroyed. Through daring maneuvers they managed to outrun enemy fighters to land in the deserts of Tatooine, near the smuggling down of Mos Espa – in Hutt controlled territory. It was there that they sought to refuel, acquire a new hyperdrive, to complete their journey to Coruscant, where the Queen would plead her case to before the 500 Republica._


	4. To Turn in Need

A/N: For a better example of what it might feel like, listening to the insides of a computer, or of the internet, read William Gibson's _Neuromancer. _It marked the beginning of cyberpunk; it's a mindbender! I only imitate.

* * *

**Chapter 3: To Turn in Need**

_Oh, to what, then can we turn in our need?_

_Not to an angel. Not to a person._

- Rilke, First Elegy

**Mos Espa, Tatooine**

As it was her first ride in a spaceship, Sabé thought she didn't fare too badly, though by the time they touched ground she did have to be excused in order to lose the day's breakfast, lunch, and even a part of last night's dinner in the fresher. But while the thing went on, even when the cockpit swung crazily to the right and left, she had been in the highest of spirits. Sabé had never even seen a J-type 327 Nubian Royal Starship (NuRos for short), let alone ride in it. If Saché had told her this beautiful machine was to figure largely in her escape, she might have slept better last night.

They boarded amid blaster fire and shouted commands, and there was a flurry of activity as the Queen and her handmaidens fumbled with a series of belts that would strap them safely to their seats. The young Jedi with his funny crop of reddish hair had checked the belts on each of them before following his master to the cockpit. Sabé noted with a bit of detached interest that everyone's knuckles were as white as her own.

But when the pilot began the initiation and launch sequence, the pandemonium of the day and the tensile silence of the throne room all became a distant memory, leaving nothing but the pure, ringing tones of this glorious machine. Even the stinging, whining tones of the blaster fire seemed subdued, assimilated into the music of the Nuros; no longer whistles of destruction, but the high-flying accompaniment to the symphony that was this starship.

The ground fell away below them with the warm roar of thrusters, and the air itself grew solid as the ship aimed its nose toward the stars and began its bounding rise. Outside the small windows of the throne room Sabé saw the horizon of earth and sky tilt and become vertical; the sun shone hard and her head fell back onto the chair, and with a strange feeling in her stomach they were shooting out of the bright glorious day into the speckled vacuum of night. The space between everything grew infinitely wide and there was such freedom in the sailing that Sabé closed her eyes to the harmony of silence. It was then that she heard the discordant notes of the Federation's Blockade, and then the cabin started swaying and spinning with an acrobatic verve that was at once exhilarating and also completely sickening. They were dodging enemy fire, Sabé thought, as red and purple streaks hurtled past the small windows, and willed her ears to adjust to the almost supersonic whine of the ship's blasters.

She heard the sharp blue noise of the blast that pierced the hull of their ship. And while the cabin shook with almost an unbearable frequency she heard, below the din of voices and the roar of thrusters, the white note of the hyperdrive go suddenly silent, while something else near it began stuttering – the shield generator, she thought – and then also fall quiet.

Her heart, already shook loose by the evasive maneuvers, leapt into her throat. Without the shield generator they were as good as dead, and Sabé had never fancied a death by fire – but just then she felt the bright flare of something, the electrical equivalent of a shock to the fibrillating heart, and the shield generator clicking rhythmically once more. A droid, she thought, sensing the distinctive rickety feeling that denoted the presence of an AI.

Now that the danger was gone, anger flashed up, sudden and unexpected. Sabé realized with black amusement that it hadn't arisen with fear for her life, or the life of Padmé, but from indignation at damage to the NuRos.

In the end they passed through the Trade Federation blockade unscathed. Safety belts were unbuckled and relieved sighs filled the air. When the Jedi arrived to make their report, the other girls had regrouped and gathered calmly behind Sabé, in order of height. Padmé made the hand gesture for "Opportunity", and so Sabé sent her off to clean the little droid, model number R2D2. It had rerouted the power feed to their shield generator after the hyperdrive had been shot; Sabé would have liked to take a look at it herself, but that was not possible at the moment. It seemed to her a balanced logic to send Padmé to do something Sabé would have liked to do.

The ship, meanwhile, sailed in a ringing harmony all the way to Tatooine, which was – as the Jedi informed them – a Rim World in Hutt controlled territory.

* * *

In the days when she served with the sisters of Ailla, there were few rules to living in the abbey. Sabé knew them still: Observe silence, Work diligently, Do not argue with the Sisters (though how she was to do that under a vow of silence was anyone's guess), and Fix anything that's broken.

Her days in the service of Queen Amidala were quite different; for starters involved getting shot at, and visiting on Hutt-controlled Outer Rim planets. But most of the rules from the abbey worked just as well, here.

About five minutes after their landing on Tatooine, Sabé was woken up from a three-hour nap to a demonstration of Rule Number Two (Do not argue with Padmé or Panaka). Her watch read 3 AM Naboo time. Rabé, Eirtaé were also in sleeping bags. Padmé was fully dressed, rushing from one end of the antechamber to the other, gathering her things. Outside it was full noon and the abrasive desert sunshine shot through the small cabin windows.

"I'm going into Mos Espa with Master Jinn," Padmé said.

Half-out of her comforter, Sabé squinted at her Queen.

"Padmé – this is Hutt controlled territory. It's a hangout for space-trash – this really can't be safe. "

"Sabé," Padmé said in what Sabé recognized as her Flippant Finagler, "my mother will worry after my health and well-being. You can worry about our cover. _I_ will worry about getting us off this planet."

"Do you not trust the Jedi with this?" Rabé finished her question with a yawn.

"Trust isn't the issue; for better or worse we are in their hands," Padmé said, flipping and checking the cartridge on her blaster with a practiced movement, "I'm just going to see that it isn't for worse."

"You just don't want to be stuck in the ship with nothing to do," Sabé muttered.

"Negative. You girls are all I have in the world," Padmé said, flashing her most winning smile, "I would not leave you unless the most dire circumstances called for it."

"I can't believe Panaka agreed to this."

Padmé gave Sabé a look, "Panaka works for me, whether I am handmaiden or Queen. Take care of yourselves, girls."

And then she was gone.

"Nice try, though," said Rabé, rubbing her eyes.

"Who died and made her Queen?" Eirtaé mumbled from across the room, blond hair hanging over her face.

With Padmé gone, Captain Panaka briefed them, they would have full run of the ship, kitchen and all. However, he flashed his dark eyes at them under the visor (polished again to a shine), it would be advisable to keep to the throne room, and retrieve anything only when necessary. Tatooine had a diurnal cycle of 22.7 standard hours, and the twin suns were to set in about five standard hours, so they should get over their current state of drowsiness, and get the rest of the plane set up for habitation. They should not be here for more than a couple of days, but that was no excuse to neglect on the housekeeping. In addition they were to keep the charade of Sabé as queen at all times on the journey – walls were thin in the spacecraft, and the secret must be kept.

"What of the engine malfunction, Captain?" Sabé asked him.

Jedi Padawan was working on the problem – but other than the leaking hyperdrive, nothing else was making any trouble. This Sabé took to mean that Panaka really had no idea what went on in a ship's engine, and she resolved to go look at it herself.

The girls got to work. Rabé assembled the standard equipment for a medical room while Eirtaé retrieved the Queen's robes from the holding. Sabé tried to put the queen's quarters into some semblance of order, and sent word for dinner to be served. The ship was equipped for short-distance travel, with jumps through hyperspace. In fact it was geared more for pomp and style than for absolute comfort. Nonetheless the kitchens were stocked with the standard flash-frozen fare and protein pellets for space travel, enough to last a full crew about a month. The food was, in short, uninspiring.

The captain commed to inform them that crew – and the Jedi who was left on the ship – would dine in their quarters, so the girls wouldn't have to keep up the Decoy Act during mealtimes. This left Sabé, Rabé, and Eirtaé to look on skeptically as the small packets of SynthFeast (a deluxe package that included Synthsteak, Synthmaize and Synthgreens) bubbled and rose and took vaguely recognizable shapes in the oven.

Thanks to Saché's warning, Sabé had packed with her a small library of tea that had been a going away present from the Sister Mabela. It included such exotic tastes such as the Dagoban Bentaxne berry and Dianogan, as well as the more reasonable varieties, and had her favorite Kopi tea. Rabé dug out a small packet of blossom tea, made from the same flowers that created the blossom wine. Eirtaé said she'd stick with her Caf, dehydrated and reconstituted though it was, rather than put the unpronounceable into her system. Dinner was served.

The twin sunsets were quite spectacular, and two hours after it was dark Sabé left her companions to their holodrama, and made her way downstairs. After all, Captain Panaka had only limited them to the throne room during daylight hours (or perhaps he did not; but this would count as a necessary excursion, Sabé thought).

The engine room was deserted, which suited her just fine. It would be take some time before Sabé would be familiar with the ship, and mutual exploration has its best beginnings in solitude.

In the Abbey, although it was said that Sabé was apprentice to Sister Thessa, in truth the pupil long ago surpassed the teacher. In her lay life Sister Thessa studied as a civil engineer and had passing knowledge of how to fix the numerous air-filters, water-heaters and generators that kept the Abbey in working shape. But Sabé, though she had no formal training whatsoever, had from the beginning an intuitive understanding of how electrical systems worked. A functioning machine _felt_ right to her, and one that was damaged _felt_wrong in a way particular to its malfunction. In addition to her skills at spotting mechanical troubles, Sabé was also a quick study at repair, and never minded getting dirty. Thus as the money began to dry up at the Abbey (not that they ever had much to begin with) and the machines grew dilapidated it was she who rerouted and patched corners through less than perfectly accepted methods, but it kept cost down and the abbey running.

On Tatooine, under completely different circumstances, Sabé nonetheless took the same procedure to familiarize herself with the Nubian Royal Starship. She sat down in the center of the round chamber that held the main engine and ship controls, crossing her legs. She was in the bowels of the ship, and the engine room hummed around her, a serene star field of a thousand switches, gauges, and alarms. A caustic mix of odors floated in the air: cool transparisteel and warm engine oil, clean metal floors and the distinctive aftertaste of charred hyperdrive.

Her method began with sitting, so really it was the Sisters who gave her access to her knack. For only when the body was quiet did it become possible to listen.

To the outer ear the ship presented in beeps and whirls of mechanical devices, and sometimes it was possible to catch the high whine of the near-ultrasonic band, vibrating just beyond her range of hearing. And perhaps after listening long enough it was possible to feel the rhythm of it; the layering of different processes, all stemming back to a single power source and all controlling different levels of the machine.

But with the ship, as with any and every mechanical device, it was possible to find a tone, a pitch, one singular note to which all the breathing machinery sang in harmony. One note, which, even when hummed low on the breath, sent vibrations through the whole of the ship. It was possible to know, and later to diagnose, a machine by finding the discordance in the harmony of sounds. Or at least this was how Sabé could explain her strange affinity to repairing mechanical fixtures.

The note could not be found by the ears alone. It was not so much a matter of pitch or tone or sound as a matter of crossing the plane between the organic human awareness and the mechanic, electrical impulses of the ship.

Sabé sat to find the note of the NuRos. She assumed the meditation pose, right palm holding the left in her lap, thumbs barely touching. The eyes were cast a few feet in front of her, and soon the breath grew slower. And then the eyes stopped seeing much of anything at all.

The acrid smell faded first. Then the lights of the engine room assumed a liquid heat, and the quiescent machines buzzed to life around her, a familiar but fantastical beast, straight-edged and dazzling. Beneath it she could detect a chord. It was much easier now, here, than at any time before in her life. The bright tang of exhilaration shot through her veins, and she let the chord strum through her muscles and sinews and bones, until she too vibrated with the ship. There were three primary tones, making a minor chord – tight, tuned, and ringing. The notes painted a swathe across her vision until her shut eyes flashed fluorescent pink and sunlit green and stormy gray. New notes added themselves to the chord, piercing between the smooth chromium flanks of the ship.

In the harmony Sabé felt as if she could let go of the human body to navigate through the field of electricity, ride on the invisible magnetic waves and feel pulsing all around her coalesce in a great glittering net, the core of the machine. Sabé tested her voice, humming low the note closest within her range and found the soft, but sometimes ragged edges of the human voice highlighting over the range of electric ringing.

The leaking, sizzled hyperdrive was a silent hole. The only sign of its presence was the static that rode high above the wide, dazzling band of the note. She waited for the fuzz and the crackles to fade, then adjusted her ear to higher pitches, lifting across frequencies of the overhead lights and the ultrasonic buzz of embedded wires, even higher until the whole of the note faded into silence; infinity self-enclosed in a few vibrational modes.

And just as she opened her mouth to test a new pitch, the most unwelcome scuffling noise sounded directly behind her. Sabé snapped unpleasantly back into her body – the sensation was so very odd, as if her ears closed themselves off, and again she could only hear what was organically detectable. The symphony of the ship disappeared, and there was only the thought – one that has occurred only too often of late – that Captain Panaka was not going to like this one bit.

She turned without bothering to mask the fierce scowl on her face, and found herself looking at Jedi Padawan Kenobi.


	5. Between River and Rock

A/N: Sound of Music reference seemed apt, given all the talk of Nunneries and Romance. Read and Review!

* * *

**Chapter 4: Between River and Rock**

_If only we too could discover a pure, contained_

_human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil_

_between river and rock._

-Rilke, Second Elegy

**Desert outside Mos Espa, Tatooine**

"Your Royal Highness," Kenobi recovered swiftly from his surprise, and sketched a very proper bow. He was only a little hampered in the endeavor by the large mug that he carried in one hand. She recognized its contents as the Corustanti Stim tea by its dark purple color and the general consistency of mud. A small cup was usually more than enough to keep a grown man awake a whole day; besides the which it stained the tongue a deep purple. Of course the Jedi would drink it in a mug.

"Jedi Kenobi," Sabé wiped the scowl off her face with a great effort of will, and forced herself to say more pleasantly, "I did not expect to see you here"

"I could say likewise, Your Highness," he replied, with a lazy blink.

A beat, as they looked at each other.

Sabé had the distinct impression that Kenobi was sizing her up, but not in a normal way. His eyes were focused on her, but at the same time they passed a little beyond her. And then he seemed to become aware of her scrutinizing his scrutiny, and gave a grin – as if to say, _you caught me._

She supposed he could be called handsome – very handsome, even. His features were regular, well-formed, and there was a leanness, an athleticism that made itself evident even in the way he stood, with a cup of tea in his hand. Smiling lent him a boyish air and highlighted the difference between the youth of his face and the decided maturity of his vocation, his uniform, his duty. Braid and spiked hair aside, Sabé remembered that this was the man who jumped off the balcony and dodged and cut through enemy blaster droids with barely a flicker of emotion on his face.

"Are you satisfied with the engine room, Your Royal Highness?" He asked.

"Quite," Sabé replied, ducking her head to smooth out her expression, "The ship is a marvel. Although we are missing a rather key component."

"The hyperdrive," he agreed absentmindedly, and his eyes fell over her again with a neutral curious look, noting the formal sitting posture, the lay of the engine room about her, and then passed over her face, once, then again.

They were wide eyes, a bright, summery blue. A child's eyes, she thought as they scanned over her, curious, open, receptive. He was still dressed in that uniform that the Jedi seemed to favor. The tunic was a heavy weave of beige fabric, framing a loose V about the neck and hanging to the tops of the knees. The same beige trousers (though made of heavier material than the shirt), and tall synth-leather boots, ochre in hue and polished to a shine. A brown cloak flowed off his shoulders, and from his belt glinted the handle of the lightsaber. The Padawan's braid hung over the left ear.

Now the half-smile on his face told her that he had noticed her inspection, and was quite willing to hold still and let her come to her own conclusions. Indeed, such conclusions would be easily reached were it not for that underlying sense of something not quite coherent about him. Sabé could only say, if asked, that he looked too young – his shoulders were too thin and his eyes too wide when they opened on the world – to be capable of all that he could do, all that she had seen him do. And that being a Jedi, he nonetheless smiled to freely for one, that though he stood still to be examined the secrets that were important could not be seen. Only the strangeness could be seen.

There was silence between them, and under that, the sounds of the ship.

Sabé recalled Padme's rule number one in awkward situations – if you can't make interesting, make nice. She tried, belatedly, to slip back into the Queen's persona.

"We are very grateful to you for your assistance earlier, Jedi Kenobi," she said in Royal Graciousness, so glad for something to say that she even remembered the royal plural, "the situation with the Trade Federation was much graver than we had realized."

"You are welcome, Highness," he said, all manners again, "Master Qui-Gon did not expect the negotiations to fall through as they did, but once the Viceroy made his intentions clear, our plan of action was made clear as well."

"Nonetheless it was a very impressive display when you did show up," she said, in Courtly Flattery, "One could hope for no better show from the galaxy's noble rescuers."

"I only follow Master Qui-Gon," Kenobi said, propping a shoulder on the side of the doorway, "I go where he takes me."

So flattery would get her nowhere.

"His resourcefulness should prove a useful skill, we hope, in Master Jinn's acquiring a new hyperdrive without our having to spend the necessary credits?"

This time his smile was quick and effortless.

"Master Qui-Gon will think of something, Your Royal Highness. Of that I am sure."

"Much rests on his shoulders."

"It always has."

There was no denying Kenobi's obvious affection for his master; the smile signaled the way in, Sabé realized. Flattery was uninteresting to him next to genuine feeling. And while Padmé might understand how to speak by conceptualizing her opponent's interests, it was not the Queen that can get through to him. The persona will facilitate nothing with Kenobi, not because he was unsophisticated, but simply uninterested. Perhaps it would be easier for Sabé to just speak plain truth.

"I confess, Jedi Kenobi, that Captain Panaka would be less than perfectly pleased to find me here," she said, "I would appreciate it if you could keep this just between the two of us."

Jedi Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi, for his part, could hardly override his chivalrous instincts to report the incident to the rather touchy Captain of security. First of all he answered to Qui-Gon alone; and besides, Panaka worked for Queen Amidala anyway, and could really have little to say if the Queen wished to be in the engine room.

At his affirmative nod she gave a grateful smile, and he felt the force around them open into a bright, placid pool. A lovely girl, he thought; particularly engaging when she smiled a true smile.

Obi-Wan was in the middle of a singularly strange meditation when a disturbance in the force lured him down into the bowels of the ship – armed with the Stim tea, of course. He found only a girl-queen, clearly disgruntled at having her solitude disturbed, but apparently amenable to his presence. She did not have any touch of the dark to her, nor any sensibility to the light that he could see. No, there was no detectable force-sensitivity. Nonetheless he sensed something humming, strumming below it, but as a man upon a country road might have a sense of the underground lake – by the birds, perhaps, and a certain scent of the soil, but altogether dimly and without certainty. For she radiated a stolid serenity, a warm swathe of simple calm that he felt at the edges of his mind, and he had no explanation for it.

Obi-Wan told himself to get a grip. Perhaps the little adventure with the Nemodians had shook him more than he had thought, to make him think now that a girl's kindness manifested itself in the force.

He took a seat next to her on the floor, careful to maintain a respectful distance. But his little promise to secrecy seemed to have opened a space between them, and he saw her very differently, in the strange ways that eyes have when an object in the field of vision takes on sudden interest.

He had read the file on her, of course, but there wasn't much to glean from the facts. The record of her birth name was sealed, but he pieced together that she was born fourteen years ago in a village in the Naboovian mountains, a simple country girl who then began her meteoric political rise at the Theed Academy. The Naboovians had a strange history of electing extremely young girls to high ceremonial offices, said an aside, inserted for the purpose of acquainting the young incredulous Jedi to the customs of aliens.

Earlier in the day he had the material presence of that affirmation. The gravitas of her appearance and the steadiness of her voice impressed him greatly (he was even impressed by her height). Amidala might be all of fourteen years old, but she was Queen; of that there was no doubt.

But here, now, sitting by her Obi-Wan could not ignore her obvious youth. He could not help but notice the smallness of her arms and legs as she sat engulfed in her royal robes, the residue of childhood upon her features under the make-up. When she spoke he noted the line on her inner lip where the white face-paint gave way to pink flesh. It was the edge of the mask; even if the mask fit her skin-tight. The Queen was the shell, he thought.

Despite his keen awareness – or perhaps because of it – Obi-Wan felt himself very much at ease. He had a sense of her courage and her resourcefulness earlier today, but now he had a sense of _her,_and it was thus possible to feel very much at home sitting by the Queen of Naboo on the cold floor of the engine room, in their temporary exile, and speak with her at length.

She talked about their Capitol Theed, and the breaking of the Long Peace, he about Qui-Gon and the Jedi. She seemed particularly interested in force meditation, and spoke intelligently and knowledgeably about the Naboovian monastic orders that shared practices and philosophies with the Jedi. She then warned him to steer clear of too much Stim Tea late in the evenings, with a maternal gravity that he found absurdly charming.

When he stood reluctantly to proceed with his original task, which was to make a complete inventory of the damages, she requested to help.

"I know little about machines," she said, for the first time biting the corner of her lower lip, as if unsure how much to divulge about her knowledge, "I have, what you might call, a knack – with them."

But for all her modesty it was she who reminded him to recheck the energy supply to their shield generator. The circuit was broken on the system where it was attached to the hyperdrive. Now as R2 had fixed it, the generator was on a different loop that supplied energy to the lighting fixtures and kitchen appliances. Obi-Wan logged onto the mainframe computer and switched the fuel cell output directed to the leaking hyperdrive to now feed the generators, in case there was a power leak in the former.

While he keyed in the necessary commands, consulting a mechanical manual that Captain Panaka had lent him, she was efficiently dismantling the hyperdrive frame. By the time he was finished reprogramming the ship's solar panels to harvest the sunlight of the Twin suns tomorrow, she had the parts of the drive laid out on a steel platform, and was flipping a multi-headed screwdriver in her right hand.

The smell of charred oil was overwhelming. The blaster fire had burned a smoking path through the complex organization of wires and small, interlocking chips, shattering the two superconductor chambers, which proceeded to spill its coolant into the rest of the machine. What lay before them in the engine room was like a battle's aftermath covered in a liquid blue goo.

"Well, even my ambitions to salvage some parts of the hyperdrive now seem too high," he said.

"The shot initially broke the chiasm point," she said, pointing it out, "can you see?"

He leaned in close and saw that the amber-colored plate was indeed charred beyond recognition.

She frowned, "Only from the chiasm point did it then deflect and hit the superconducting chambers – or it wouldn't have shot through them both; the metal on the coolant systems is the toughest there is."

"A very lucky shot, then."

The Queen shot him a worried look.

"Lucky? It's one in a million shot to do something like this – can you imagine? The only blast that caught the ship managed to hit managed to get the hyperdrive, and not only that it miraculously missed both superconducting chambers to fry the chiasm itself."

She made a disgusted sound, and tapped expertly on the control keys to isolate the shattered fragments, then dragged a piece of blue tarp over the parts.

"Jedi Kenobi, times like this I feel like they are right who say that there really is such a thing as fate, or luck, and there are no accidents. And I really don't like that feeling."

He was intrigued, "you don't believe in fate, Your Highness?"

"I'd rather now believe in it, no."

Obi-Wan frowned, "I had no idea that it was a matter of preference."

She turned and cast an assessing glance at him, a combative glint in her eyes, "then you do believe, in fate, in the Universal Design, Jedi Kenobi?"

"I trust that there are greater powers at work, yes. My force sensitivity tells me so."

"Tells you?" she said, incredulity in her voice.

"Certain force-sensitives have a bond with the Unifying Force, and often receive visions, dream-sendings from that connection, and can with some accuracy predict the future. I don't know if you would call that 'fate' – but there's no denying that there are powers at play in the universe whose trajectories have been set, and move inexorably toward one another."

"And you have these visions?" The frown of something like recognition passed over her face.

"Yes," he admitted, "most force-dreams are blurry and vague. The gift of the Unifying force is utterly useless for combat situations, but on the other hand, I am always a source of ominous and ambiguous predictions about future woe."

She smiled wanly."Do you know, Jedi Kenobi, that I have a friend who has the same gift as you?"

"Indeed?"

"She calls it her knack, and it is entirely limited to foretelling, not saber fighting or your acrobatics. Only this: that on certain days she wakes with a strong conviction of what is to happen, and sees it happen. She predicted the Trade Federation's invasion, and warned me about it."

"That is quite gift," he said, "are you certain she is not a force-sensitive?"

"Would she not be a Jedi, if she were?" the Queen shook her head, "she is a friend - an orphan of the pandemic. I met her at the Palace."

He was about to inquire further into the matter of the pandemic when the wall comm unit buzzed. Captain Panaka requested his inspection report before retiring for the evening. They said their goodbyes.

* * *

Sabé returned to find Rabé and Eirtaé still engrossed in the holodrama. She palmed the door shut behind her, and went to the bathroom to wash off the makeup while the strains of violin wafted through the door.

_And somewhere out there –_a female voice intoned in with a throaty whisper - _is a lady who I think will never be a nun. Good bye, Ben, my darling._

There was the unmistakable sound of Rabé keening in delight, and the equally unmistakable sound of Eirtaé snorting in derision. Sabé emerged from the fresher to see the screen frozen mid-motion, depicting a handsome dark haired man (all the more handsome for being in uniform) as he charged down a set of stairs toward the distant shadow of a woman.

"Seven gates of Chaos take me," Eirtaé snorted, "I can't believe you roped me into watching this."

Rabé glared at the blond handmaiden, "You weren't complaining before, as I recall."

"Well, the bit with all the children was pretty funny, but now it's disintegrated to utter hogswash," Eirtaé retorted.

"By hogswash you mean romance," Rabé said, "and how there's anything wrong with that I really cannot imagine."

"Well, I simply refuse to watch any more of this," Eirtaé said, and turned to Sabé, "Where in Shiraya's name have you been?"

"Hiding from the romance, of course," Sabé smiled, "though I was interrupted by the Jedi."

"Kenobi, eh? Now what did you talk about - did you share your respective stances on celibacy?" The smirk was back on Rabé's face.

"For your information, Rabé," said Eirtaé, exasperated, "the whole universe is not one giant romance novel. But Kenobi is pretty cute – Sabé, what did you talk about really?"

"Not celibacy, certainly," Sabé shot Rabé a disgusted look, wishing that they still had combat training the next morning so she could beat a little sense the Handmaiden, "and certainly not the lack thereof. We talked about the ship. He says that Master Qui-Gon will figure out a way to get a new hyperdrive in the next few days."

"We will see about that, won't we?" Eirtaé was unimpressed, "either way I'm going to bed. You girls can stay and finish that ridiculous holodrama."

"You really dislike it that much?" Sabé asked.

Eirtaé gave the screen a considering look, pursed her lips, and said, "I'd rather not write the story in my head before I've even met the man, wouldn't you?"

And with that parting shot she left for the fresher.


	6. If I Cried Out

**Chapter 5: If I Cried Out**

_Who, if I cried out, _

_would hear me _

_among the Angel's hierarchies?_

_-Rilke, first Elegy_

As resistant as the human organism was to change and openness, Sabé reflected, it was still very capable of getting over excitement in a heartbeat. Anything stimulating could turn easily into boredom in the space of a few hours. And while the day before the last thing on her mind was getting out of the ship, this morning nothing seemed quite as urgent.

There was a brief message from Padmé on the receiving dock – they were safe, in the city, and going to visit the scrap trader today. It ended, _Keep out of trouble – Padmé._

Not that there was, or would be, any trouble to keep clear of. After a quick breakfast Sabé put on the Queen's battle dress again. While Eirtaé pulled the stays tight, Rabé was picking through the feathers of the twelve-pound head dress, ruffled in yesterday's hurried flight. Sabé was adept at putting the make-up on herself now, though the whole operation had a sense of the absurd to it. It took forty minutes at their fastest to put on the whole Queen's get-up, and all of it for the two other members of the crew, and one Jedi Padawan.

"Your hair is growing out," Rabé said, laying down the pieces of adhesive across Sabé's scalp for the wig. A reddish stubble had sprung up all across the bare expanse of her scalp, and in the night when she slept Sabé felt the air stirring on her hair. In color it was a deep aubor, and almost straight where Padmé's curled ferociously.

"My father would have strangled me if I shaved it all off," Eirtaé said from somewhere behind Sabé, "not my mother, mind you, my father."

"He's a politician?" Sabé asked, trying not to wince as Eirtaé tightened on another stay.

"No, he's Count Narmlé," Eirtaé said, "He doesn't have to be elected. Seriously. Don't you know anything?"

Sabé remembered vaguely that one of the past kings of Naboo – back before the days of elected monarchs – was a man named Narmlé. In fact, there was probably a whole dynasty of Narmlé.

"So you're royalty. Why are you working as handmaiden, then? I thought Panaka had to bully everyone into taking the job."

A sigh of exasperation from Eirtaé. Rabé's mouth kicked up in a corner as she bent to fix a stray lock of hair on the wig.

"Honestly, Decoy. Nobody cares about the old names anymore, not in the way they used to. Otherwise how could a fourteen year old girl from the middle of nowhere be elected Queen instead of a Narmlé?" Eirtaé's voice had taken on the tone of careful disinterest.

"Don't look at me like that, Rabé," Eirtaé continued, "I was at the Academy with Padmé, if you'll remember. I know exactly what she can do; and I don't envy her taking over at a moment like this. That's why I'm here, because she will need my help. Hell, it's certainly not for the pay."

* * *

The morning drew on slowly in the throne room. Captain Panaka, stiff and formal as ever, commanded the crew to make report twice a day to the Queen on the status of their ship, and the Jedi Padawan to relay what information he had from his itinerant master.

Ric Olié, the pilot, gave a brief account of how he evaded the Federation Blockade and summarized the damage done to the ship. He had a competent, if slightly disheveled air about him, as if taking him out of the pilot's seat had somehow dislodged him from his natural environment. In the cockpit he was a hero; but in the middle of the Throne room he was a stooped, balding man with beady blue-green eyes.

"Pilot Olié was head of the Bravo Squadron before coming to us," Panaka said, "he's the best fighter Naboo has to offer."

Sabé thanked him gravely for his service, at which Olié made an impatient noise through his nose. "Thanks aren't needed, Highness. The evasive maneuvering is all fun and games. Hell, I don't mind trying to dodge the Federation bastards any day of the week. But begging your pardon, Majesty, we wouldn't be holed up here in this god-forsaken sandpit if you only put some guns on this ship.

"Peace is well and good until Naboo gets to dealing with space-trash that has no respect for any of it, who take anyone without firepower to be a weakling. We'll need to arm ourselves, Majesty, and I'm not only talking about this ship. The blockade wouldn't be there except that we don't have the bombs to blast them right out of space," He pointedly ignored Panaka as the captain of security tried to cut into his tirade, "I mean no disrespect, Highness, but I will not fly this ship with any one in it back into the line of fire unless we get a 300X blaster coming out of every port."

Behind Olié, Sabé saw Obi-Wan carefully conceal a smile.

She looked back to their pilot, who was all but bristling with indignation, and was surprised to recognize something of Saché and Padmé, just behind the eyes, in the mutual knowledge that there were times when pure force seemed the only solution.

"The Long Peace has been broken, pilot," Sabé said, "Perhaps it is time for the Naboo to arm themselves once more, that we might save our way of life. If you will draw up a plan to outfit this starship with blasters, it will be seen to that we never again travel through enemy fields without defense."

He gave her a curt nod, and the hold of his shoulders relaxed some, as if surprised that he should find any monarch actually reasonable. She glanced surreptitiously at Captain Panaka, who merely looked resigned.

Olié retreated back to the crew's holdings, and it was time for Obi-Wan's report.

He had cleaned his shirt, Sabé saw, all the scuff marks and smudges from yesterday's fight were gone, and his hair bristled with a faint reddish hue in the light of morning. He was also keeping an assiduously blank look on his face – she could notice the effort in the corner of his mouth, and the way that his hands fidgeted a little.

There was only one reason why he might be less than perfectly calm– there must have been news from Jinn, something that disconcerted Obi-Wan, yet something that did not trouble Padmé.

"Your Royal Highness," Obi-Wan sketched a bow.

He was certainly a stickler for formality, Sabé thought. Olié, who had lived in Naboo for all of his life, and a devoted patriot, had difficulty distinguishing between the titles, threw out "majesties" and "highnesses" and "Honors" interchangeably. Obi-Wan would never be caught in these little incoherencies, she was certain, not if he could help it.

What he reported followed in mostly the same vein as Padmé's transmission. Qui-Gon, Padmé, and the Gungan Jar-Jar had arrived safely in the town, and had taken up residence with a family as a base of operations. He could not tell her much more about the people than that it was a mother and son who worked for the space scrapper in Mos Espa.

"There is nothing else, Jedi Kenobi?"

He shook his head.

"Nothing of note, Your Royal Highness."

Just then Sabé saw a strange shadow pass over his face, but before she could inquire further an alarm came on in the cabin, filling the room with a shrill, grating sound. Orange lights flashed along the air vents. Both were turned off in the next second, and overhead they heard Ric Olié's gravelly voice announce, "Sandstorm's come out of nowhere, initial burst of air particulates got in the ventilation system. It's nothing to worry about. We should be just fine, Majesty."

Under her the ship tilted a little, and the sound of something like rain came upon them in the desert planet, a thousand fine drops sweeping against the ship's hull. The crescendo of whistling air increased slowly, until it sounded like they were lifting off.

The sky grew dark outside the cabin; the eastward tilting sun grew dim. The meeting was effectively dismissed as Captain Panaka hurried to the window, and then was off to the cockpit with barely a nod in Sabé's direction. He would not be so easily calmed by Olié's pronouncements, she knew.

From the transparisteel window on the port side it was as if the air had grown solid against the windows, striking it with the sound of a thousand pins. Waves of it buffeted against the side of the ship. The shapes and shadows of the distant town were erased in the general dimness. Slants of sun broke through the layers and filaments of sand against the window, as rivers might carve the green continents. Shapes emerged: a wing, an arm, the sweep of a blade, a drifting cloak.

Rabé and Eirtaé moved to the windows to look outward, and the occasional rays of the sun through sand sparked along their flame robes.

Sabé did not move from her throne. She was not expected to; and Obi-Wan too held his seat at the edge of the audience chamber. She saw him glance at the spectacle of sand with studied indifference.

"You have seen sandstorms before, Jedi Kenobi?"

He gave her an appraising look, "No. But in Coruscant the sky is so thick with ships that it blocks out the sun. This almost reminds me of home."

It seemed that he was going to say more, but a frown caught his face. With the expression of a predator he turned his head to some invisible sound, drew his brows against some unseen scent and half-made to rise from his seat.

"Do you sense that?" he asked

And to her surprise, Sabé realized that she did. It was a faint sound, like the tattoo of fingers drumming against a tabletop. A hologram, she thought, a second before all the ship computers switched on automatically to the image of Governor Bibble. Not merely a hologram. It came on the wings of darkness.

Bibble had the access codes of the NuRos' emergency channel. It was the last resort of contact between two set points in space if all other communication devices have failed – effectively a crude walkie-talkie, to guard against catastrophic communication failure. But that channel was set to a separate line than the rest of the comm devices on the ship, and could not be turned off.

All this went through her head, as if of their own volition, even as the lone blue hologram of Sio Bibble spoke.

_The death toll is catastrophic. We must bow to their wishes. You must contact me!_

Though the image was small, and somewhat grainy for the simplicity of the equipment, she saw the tense set of his shoulders and the deep lines of tension along his mouth, that signaled resistance to his own words. His forehead was smooth, and there was no sign of anguish along the brows; only a faint contraction of disgust at the base of the nose.

And she knew, not only was the message untrue, but it must have been sent as a tracer. Whoever was looking for them had found out where they were.


	7. Nights on Tatooine

A/N: In which Obi-Wan indulges in some rather strange habits... Enjoy!

* * *

**Chapter 6: The Nights of Tatooine**

_Oh and night: there is night_

_When a wind full of infinite space knaws at our faces…_

_Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, _

_marvelous words in the night air._

_Rilke, First and Second elegies_

Nightfall. Sabé opened her eyes and realized she had slept through the afternoon. Rabé and Eirtaé had already eaten, and were reading by the yellow cabin lights. Rabé's eyes were a little red, and Eirtaé had changed her book for a word puzzle. Each mumbled a greeting, but Sabé felt that the crisis had past. They were both worn out, drained, though Rabé deigned to fetch her something from the kitchen for dinner, since it was deemed undignified for the queen to scout for her own food.

The storm was letting up outside, the buffeting sands had lost much of their force, but the whole of it would not be dispelled until after sunset. Sabé went to the computer terminals to do some research on the things that occupied her mind. There no news on the galactic holonet on Naboo, except that the talks with the Trade Federation were expected to be resolved peacefully in the near future.

A few hours after sunset, Rabé and Eirtaé went to sleep, and Sabé decided that enough was enough. It was the easiest thing to mute the alarm system near the engine room, though a little more difficult to climb out of the ship via the droid's deployment chamber. Fortunately, R2's bay was open, the little droid being still in the main hold with Ric Olié, and after some careful maneuvering she was outside.

The desert night opened before her: the sand a silver ocean, and above her the strange stars of another world. The ship was half buried by the storm: sand had accumulated under the wings, and then swallowed the wings until only the raised hull of the NuRos was left, an oblong sliver of mercury, like the shining underbelly of a fish in the immense desert.

The air surprised her with its sweetness. A shadow, a ripple in the sand unfurled, moved itself out of the cover of the wing and turned toward her. But before she could be afraid, it raised a hand in salute.

It was Obi-Wan Kenobi.

After a rather ungainly descent down the smooth side-panels of the Nuros, Sabé picked herself up. She brushed the sand from her clothes, patted her wig to make sure the fall hadn't dislodged it. She was dressed less formally, black top and leggings under a flame-colored gown, but at least her make up was intact.

He walked up to her and sketched another proper bow. She tamped down on her own reflex to curtsey. "Surely this is not a situation that demands such formality, Jedi Kenobi?"

He nodded, and showed her that he was expecting her by the second mug in his hand, still steaming. They sat between smooth metal and cool sand. Lights from the distant town – was it Mos Espa? – winked whimsically across the air. She turned the mug between her fingers, watched the steam unfurling in an upward draft.

He said, "I am sorry for the hologram, Your Royal Highness."

"Don't be ridiculous," Sabé sidestepped his unvoiced question, "it's not your fault. And besides, it would have helped nothing to respond."

"A return transmission would have alerted them to our location," he said, "that was why I thought we should not reply. But I am surprised that the Nemodians at the Federation expected you to fall for such an easy ruse."

"It wasn't a ruse," she said, and felt him look at her sharply, "at least not where our location is concerned. I'm reasonably certain that it was a tracer – a return signal piggybacked on the signal itself, overriding the ship's mainframe through an emergency code. They will have known by now where we are."

"Damn, I didn't think of that," he said quietly, running a hand through his hair in frustration, "how do you know this – about the tracer? Do the Nemodians even have that sort of technology?"

"I don't know how I know," Sabé shook her head, "I just do – I have a knack for machines, as I told you. And as for the Nemodians – I can only conjecture. They might even be working for someone besides themselves, who supplies them.d"

"Elusive," he said, half to himself, and expelled a great sigh, "if they do know our location, there is less time than I thought."

"There was never much time," Sabé said, and to divert herself she took a sip of her drink, and choked on it in a most unqueenly fashion.

Looking over she saw him fail miserably to suppress a smile.

"What in Shiraya's name is in this stuff, Kenobi?" Sabé demanded, when she had regained her breath. The bitter residue stuck like tar to her tongue, and the little bit that she swallowed burned a red path to her stomach.

His face was all mischief at her discomposure.

"It's the darkest, strongest tea Coruscant merchants have to offer – they get it from one of the Rim planets that grows a certain type of purple leaf that has the highest physiological concentration of Caf. It's also the only thing my master will drink; he carries it with him everywhere. I thought you should be initiated."

Sabé tried ineffectually to spit out the portion left in her mouth, and found that there was actually nothing left. Beside her, Kenobi was all but chortling. It was surprising how little embarrassments could burn through the facade of formality. Sabé punched him lightly on the arm, which only made him laugh harder.

"And you are subjecting yourself to this – actually I don't care about that – you are subjecting me to this _why?"_

"Well I personally enjoy the stuff. And it's really a delicacy in Coruscant, your Highness –"

"_Delicacy?_ Of all the vile, disgusting, loathsome –"

They argued about the merits of beverages for a little while, a discussion that took their minds off the heaviness of the day. During the discussion Sabé informed Obi-Wan again that the Stim tea that he consumed by the mugfull should really be taken in moderated amounts, while he bragged that his force sensitivity rendered him pretty much insensible to an overdose of anything. She protested that if the current preference of Qui-Gon's taste was any indication, it was merely that their force sensitivity had killed off all their taste-buds, which was quite in keeping with their philosophies of life.

"And what philosophy is that?" Obi-Wan asked.

"_There is no pleasure, there is only utter and complete gustatory dissatisfaction,_" Sabé intoned ominously, and he laughed.

Silence drew on again. But in it Sabé recognized something like the silences between Saché and her. Something – almost – friendly. Sabé took another sip of her tea and shuddered. The stuff was disgusting, but at least it was warm against the bracing breeze.

"Do you think it's true?" she asked, "Do you feel that Bibble was telling the truth in that message?"

"No," he said, with utter conviction, "he looked like a man who did not want to say what he was saying."

She took another sip of the tea, this time only making a small face.

"Even if Governor Bibble was forced," Sabé said, "I doubt that the Trade Federation would prove to be reasonable invaders for long."

He turned toward her, and said after a pause, "You must miss your home, and your loved ones, to be so far away."

Home. The word assailed her with confusion; for not a single image came foremost to her mind, rather a shuffle emerged, one image melding into the next. The Abbey, first, bluish silences of the dormitories and the warm roar of the machines, but that was not it. The orphanage, then, the din of hundred other children, and the persistent sneezing in the evenings and the look of tiredness in the eyes of her teachers, the yellowing pages of a library book. No, the memory was too dim and fluid. Sabé was forced to remember back to her childhood, to the faint ghosts of her parents, shadows behind the curtain that summer night, soft voices and laughter. Was that home, then? Those seven years before the night she woke up in the hospital –

Obi-Wan was looking at her closely, as if sensing some conflict.

"Yes," she said, for his face was turned toward hers in the night, and it was all darkness between them, "Yes, I miss it. I miss home."

He was quiet for a little while, looking at the sky. There were few clouds on so dry a planet as this, and none were present here at the beginning of the drought season. All the stars were unveiled.

He said, "Qui-Gon taught me to read the star maps, you know. Back on Coruscant the streets are all alight, morning and evening. You can't see the stars for the hovercars and the buildings. But he found a projection dome in the Temple, and taught me the stars."

She looked up, and considered the strange map of the sky with him.

"He says it makes him feel at home," Obi-Wan continued, "more than anything else in the world, to know the names of the stars, to know where he is in the galaxy."

"And do you know them?"

He laughed, and he sat close enough she could almost feel the sands and the air all shaking with mirth.

"My idea of home is ten minutes with a hot drink, and a good light, and maybe a book. Somewhere quiet. But I've learned a few tricks from Qui-Gon."

He leaned back, stretching out against the hull of the ship, and motioned for her to follow his lead. Sabé set her drink gingerly in the sand, and slowly lay back. Against her the metal was unyielding, a hard, smooth plane, but not cold. Sabé relaxed almost unconsciously, her head fell a little side ways so she could see Obi-Wan's profile distinct against the silver hull, the inky night.

"Take for example that area over there," he frowned in concentration, and pointed in the general north-easterly direction, "that looks to me very much like – like a large, Corellian gunship."

"A what?"

"Don't you see it? The guns come out of the hold like so," his hand danced in a zig-zagging fashion across the sky, "and then there's all the Corellians inside, but the cursing and the infighting is so bad that the leader's secretly left in a escape pod with all their money – that's the little tail behind it, there."

Sabé could not see what he was talking about for the life of her.

"It looks more like a boot, to me."

Obi-Wan frowned at that same piece of sky, and humphed in surprise.

"Now it looks like a boot to me too," he said.

"You are rubbish at this, Kenobi," but she was laughing.

Yet there was a feeling of rightness to it all, lying under the big sky, as if her body recalled the feel of it, of herself being a minute and yet indispensable part of the world. The next lull of silence contained with it all the soundlessness of infinite space; it was like nothing she had ever felt.

"How many stars can there be?" she found herself half-whispering, for in the utter darkness of the desert they all of them emerged, descended, cascading clear points of light from behind the vacuum, the endless spaces of a million light-years. How strange to think she had been elsewhere, circling a distant star. How strange that the ship under her, cooling rapidly in the dry desert evening, could be capable of such magic – in spite of, or perhaps because of its materiality?

How easy for one person to fall apart, Sabé thought, into nothing into this great void? Just atoms, the body, merely the assembly, the fortuitous gathering of atoms, and if one fell apart from the other, then where would the body be? There would only be a cloud, a cloud in the desert, a cloud of sand and dust, felt for a moment and then blown to the four winds.

At that moment, as if the cosmos had found such reflections true but uninteresting and mundane, Sabé distinctly felt some creature scuttle across the toes of her left foot. She jumped up, swallowing a startled shriek. Instincts were difficult to override, even when one is pretending to be a queen. Sabé had crawled halfway up the hull when she noticed that her companion had moved in the exact opposite direction. Indeed, to all appearances, Obi-Wan had sprang toward the source of the movement even as she scooted herself back.

Sabé felt like a right coward for all of fifteen seconds, for she thought his reaction as the natural end of some Jedi training that dictated all enemies and dangerous must be faced head-on and without fear. Obi-Wan had closed both hands in a cage over something, and was now peeking between his palms with a look of concentration.

In the dim reflected light of ten thousand stars Sabé finally recognized the look on his face to be one of utter delight.

"A white Tatooine Sand Spider," he cried in delight, "Force, I never thought I would be lucky enough to find one of these!"

Her companion, Sabé realized belatedly, was no doubt an avid intergalactic naturalist.

For those seconds he spoke with the voice of someone caught in the throes of some ecstatic emotion, and now with a more pedestrian tone of voice (though Sabé could still detect the whip-like articulation of excitement, barely restrained under the long-trained and carefully cultivated façade) he took in her half-horrified face, and smiled encouragingly.

"Your Royal Highness, she's harmless – really more bark than bite, like most things. Would you like a look? I think I brought out my torch."

And as her pride had already taken one trample this evening, Sabé thought that the office of Queen Amidala could hardly take a second accusation of cowardice in so short a time. She was supposed to stand before the galactic senate at the 500 Republica and plead for the cause of her people, and yet could not stand straight at the sight of one ungainly bug? Certainly not on her watch, Sabé thought. All the same, persuading her petrified muscles to make their way down the side of the wing took more effort (a good deal of it gone to hide the trembling) than she would care to admit.

Since Kenobi still had his hands full of the critter, he was forced to nod to the torch clipped to his belt. Sabé had to lean in very close to retrieve it, close enough to smell the aftershave still fresh on his face, a light scent of mint hiding a more complex spiciness. Sabé fumbled a little at his utility belt, coming up at last with the torch and a very clear conviction that the young man was as lean and firm around the midriff as the rest of him seemed to be.

She worked the light easily enough, and turned it onto its lowest setting, a dim yellow. Shining it into the small gap between Obi-Wan's fingers, a little black-and-white crablike creature came into view. When the light hit it, the thing promptly scuttled back, deeper into the shadows.

Obi-Wan grunted, and Sabé almost dropped the torch.

"Did it bite you?"

"No, it's got little pincers on its legs, though," he laughed, "Don't look so horrified, Your Royal Highness. It's only a little spooked. Shine the light on it again – a little slower, this time."

They stood, two heads craned together over the prize in his hands.

"The White Tatooine Sand Spider," said Obi-Wan, in a authorial tone, "a creature of the night, ingenious web weaver and equipped like nothing else to survive in the harshest environments known to any animal, because of its poisonous – "

"Poisonous?"

"Only the web that it makes, which reduces to simple amino acids anything that it clings on to, and at times even known to melt holes into rocks."

The spider, twelve legs quivering in uncertainty, moved hesitantly across Obi-Wan's palms. The black bands on the white body undulated in a wave. The spot on its back seemed to Sabé in the shape of an eagle's eye.

"Much maligned by settlers, since it is often mistook for its deadlier cousin, the Tatooine Spice Spider, which has alternating red, black, and white stripes, and which apart from biting anything that moves is also responsible for the great numbers of spice deposits on Tatooine, which in themselves have caused a great deal of trouble for trade."

She felt, rather than saw him glance at her.

"It is beautiful, no?"

"It does have a certain simplicity, and elegance to it," Sabé allowed.

"Local customs among the sand people has it that a young couple at their betrothal wraps one strand of the sand spider's web upon their index fingers, as the pain of joining as one flesh is recreated in the brief burning of the web into their skin," Obi-Wan continued philosophically, "and of course, any man who dares kill a white spider is cursed to a lifetime of _disprized love_."

"Huh," said Sabé, eloquently.

"Seen enough, do you think?" he asked, and she nodded. Obi-Wan looked at the spider, now cowering again from the light.

"I normally would immobilize it and take it back to the temple," he said, "certainly a rare find, what a boon for our collection of arthropods in the Archives."

"Oh, don't kill it," Sabé said, "it's had hard living – and who knows how many young men and women are to be bonded, but for this little one?"

He smiled at her, delighted – and the flash of those teeth at such close quarters was somewhat overwhelming.

"It would not set a good precedent for our visit to kill our first visitor, would it?"

He bent down to the ground and uncapped his hands. The scurry upon the soft sand was audible for a moment as the captive creature made its way with some alacrity into the protective darkness of the sands. Some seconds later the sound was no longer detectable.

"Force be with you, little one," Obi-Wan said, and saluted the night with the tips of two fingers.

"You…collect bugs?"

"Most certainly, Your Royal Highness," Obi-Wan said, "I have a knack for catching them, as you have one for your machines."

He rubbed his hands together in glee, "and now that we have let the first one go, none of the others shall elude us tonight."

They began by sitting in the complete silence of the chill desert night. Sabé observed Obi-Wan, immobile, eyes closed, and for sometime it felt as if in the great darkness and the soft spill of starlight, that they were utterly transparent, merely a listening corner in the desert wind.

Then to her right, a faint motion in the sand, and Obi-Wan moving almost impossibly fast, caging the creature with his fingers and in the next instant stopping it with a spray of the anesthetic which he apparently also brought along in his tool belt, and then dropping the creature into his now-dry mug. Sabé shuddered at the thought of so many bugs in a drinking receptacle of the Queen of Naboo. Before he put them away, he would briefly call out the name of his catch, and venture a brief summary or anecdote about them which he had read on the way to the planet, after becoming familiar with the situation as it was pertinent to Jedi business.

Fascinated and half-horrified, Sabé turned on the torch at every critter paralyzed under the Temple Archivist's general preserving spray, delivered with inhuman speed by Obi-Wan.

A collection of the night's denizens offered themselves – enough sand beetles that Obi-Wan ended up leaving the last three out as a lure for some greater beast. A couple of black sand scarabs had coats that turned the most brilliant red-gold under the torch light, a millipede as long as Sabé's forearm, followed directly by something that looked like a dried-out version of a caterpillar, or like a little slice of crawling brain. The turtle-worm, Obi-Wan said sagely; the deep folds in the tough skin created a special device to conserve moisture by recycling evaporated liquid back into its insides. A scrawny sand-rat with two sets of eyes arrived and bit a dent in Obi-Wan's polished boots, and left even though ten sprays left no effect on its reflexes. It probably went away only because the polish didn't taste good to him. The sight of Obi-Wan hopping on one foot, undignified to the extreme, set her laughing, and not for the first time that evening.

They called it a night after catching the first spice-spider. Large as a hand, it was lured by the offering of the three sand beetles. Five sprays and a bit of failing later (they both of them kept a good distance from the still-moving red-black legs), and it too went in the cup.

The white Tatooine sand spider did not return that evening.

They had concluded their hunting – or rather, Obi-Wan had concluded his merciless and near-indiscriminate capture of local insect life after his mug had mostly filled with little critters that stuffing any more in was likely to damage the thin legs on at least a couple of scarabs, now long out of sight under the hill of shiny black exoskeletons. Sabé had firmly rejected his suggestion that her own mug be used so they could continue the collecting.

Quietly she followed his steps through the door that he waved open with a mere gesture and through the silent hallways until they reached the kitchen.

Sabé supposed she had no reason to be here, and yet the whole of it was like witnessing a ritual of sorts. First the Collector himself turned on the arena lights, until the plane board of the counter was glowing from the yellow spotlights, like the flat slab of a magician's table. With a sure hand Obi-Wan tilted the mug and tapped at it as he moved his hand from left to right, presenting to the bright kitchen lights the night's catch. Sabé suppressed an instinctive shudder.

Then he lifted his head and smiled at her, and she felt as caught as the bugs lying there. There was a wolfish grin on his face that she had never seen before.

"Wait for me a minute?" and at her uncertain nod he beamed – like a child recently granted the boon of a great deal of sugar in some colorful confectionary – and moved soundlessly toward his quarters, leaving Sabé with an empty mug in hand and a table full of immobilized bugs.

He returned with a large box and a handful of pins. Looking closer she realized he had disassembled one of the older datapads that must have been lying around the crew's quarters.

"Are those – "

They were. Pins were but stripped titanium wire, cracked down to the right length for an enthusiastic entymologist to pin his samples down upon the open display of the datapad, a field of tiny holes.

"This is a good way to obtain a makeshift collections box," Obi-Wan said, not taking his eyes off the small beetle that he was transferring on the tip of one pin to the new box, "I had brought along a few fold-out paper ones, with some foam padding on the bottom, really great for travel. But those were lost when the Nemodians got their hands on us and went through our ship disposing of things they thought suspicious."

"It does seem a rather unwieldy hobby for someone in your position," she agreed.

"Believe me, Your Royal Highness, I feel it keenly. There was once, three years back when I took the most amazing rare species of butterfly from Serenno. I tied the box to my belt, fought with it digging into my side and everything. But some – someone had to shoot at me at the worst possible angle. The high energy blaster fried the box completely, incinerated the specimen. Nothing but a pile of ash afterwards."

"But – " Sabé was wring to wrap her head around the rules in a world where Obi-Wan was passionate about something, where the finer point of logic and importance were at least a little askew, "if the box hadn't taken the hit you would have been shot. You could have died. Isn't it lucky then that the butterfly got it – and not you?"

"It could be seen that way, I suppose," he said in a voice which meant he supposed the opposite, "but the shot was a glancing one, or it would have caught me nonetheless. And I would much rather spend a few hours in bacta and have the Triple Monarch than to come back to Tahl – she was the Temple Archivist then – empty-handed."

His matter-of-fact tone jarred her, "I had no notion that you take to being shot with such a cavalier manner. I had no idea that you get shot on such a regular basis."

He looked up, surprised, the residue of his fantastic concentration fading from around his eyes.

"I didn't mean it to sound flippant, Your Royal Highness. I do not take lightly to being hurt – or at least, I do not venture into harm's way without preparation. But there are only samples of the Triple Monarch in three places in the galaxy – so you must understand the chances of actually finding one, and the terrible insult to injury when we had to escape the planet with barely a thing accomplished, and the specimen lost."

He returned to the meticulous transfer of insects. Sabé was silent for a while, watching his deft fingers – the callus ridges of the right hand shiny and hard-looking under the bright lights. His hands were well-formed, long fingers, each narrowing from the pads to the knuckle, as with a waist to it. They did not shake at all, but gently smoothed over the sharp points on the exoskeletons, nudged here and there, and then tensing with the exact amount of force necessary to push the needle through without damaging the outer shell of the specimen.

"And for what it's worth," Kenobi was saying, "I am hardly good company after getting shot, or so my master tells me. I tend to lose my sense of humor immediately, cease to observe even the most basic rules of civility and politeness, and go around spouting dooming verses in my delirium."

She glanced over at him, but could not tell if he had been kidding. "If ever there was an appropriate time to lose one's sense of humor," she said, "it would seem to be after when you get shot."

"With all due respect, Your Royal Highness, I doubt that you would give over any of the gravitas and dignity of your station simply because of a small loss of blood. It is the times of great stress that demands perfect equanimity of us, is it not?"

Sabé did not like to contemplate the possibility of actually getting shot – though with a strange twisting sensation she realized that the likelihood of it had gotten exponentially greater for her over the past couple of days. She scowled at Obi-Wan.

"And is that what you must attain before becoming a Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi? Perfect Equanimity?"

"Yes," he said, "Yes, I think so. And if not before, then soon after."

He had finished, and snapped on the clear plate over of the datapad-turned-specimen box. Sabé watched as he surveyed his handiwork.

It was difficult to say what made her a little uneasy. Indeed given her penchant to run and scream at the first sight of bugs it was probably the residual fear from earlier that evening. But there was a crystalline sort of focus, a very hard and polished happiness in Obi-Wan's eyes that discomfited her. It was joy that came as close to being perfectly contained and cold as she had ever.

She was suddenly glad to be on this side of the glass with him, and could not help but wonder, in an occupation that regarded the rending of his own flesh in gunfire as a matter of course, how many deaths – close and violent – he had seen. How many people he had cut down with that blade of light now clipped quiescent and inconspicuous on his belt.

She wondered if he did not already look on the deaths of others with something like equanimity, a clinical eye, detached, uninvolved, cool. She did not wish him to suffer over the deaths, Sabé told herself, trying to explain that faint sensation of horror that gripped her, but she was uneasy thinking if there were not something missing in not being able to mourn anyone, in regarding all deaths with the same quiet acceptance, the dry eye, and the hands still and unmoving. And she was suddenly charged with the violent desire that he should be made to care – that if she had died, if something went terribly wrong in this journey (for these are now the fortunes of war, she thought), she would want him to care.

Though she admitted to herself, in all likelihood she – whose dangerous job would soon end after this crisis – would live for many years longer than he, who talked about a few days in bacta as if it were nothing.

"How orderly, precise and beautiful they are," Obi-Wan said, and Sabé stepped up next to him and glanced down and the bugs arrayed with a textbook sort of regularity.

They looked as though they had never been alive, Sabé thought. They had lost the power to move her, to make her afraid.

"You are taking this back to your Temple Archivist?"

"Oh yes," Obi-Wan said, "We have quite the collection there, and Jocasta is not squeamish about freeing up space for it in the Archives."

"And the Archivist you had mentioned before – Tahl? Is she no longer there?"

Another flash of surprise over his features, then the shadow of a troubled memory and remembered pain. "No," Obi-Wan said quietly, "Tahl is dead. She was killed."

"Oh." What a world where even the temple librarians were not exempt from violent death. Sabé sensed some deeper story to it, but Obi-Wan's face had smoothed out again, and a smile drifted back to its surface.

"Though I think she would reprimand me for this. She had the most life-cherishing practice of anyone I knew. Even master Yoda wouldn't hesitate to end the mosquito that offended him, but not Tahl. She would shoo it away with the most incomprehensible gentleness. She would have been very happy about this, but also rather reluctant."

"What happened to her?" Sabé asked.

"Abduction, torture. Master Jinn knew her well," he swallowed, "as did I. but we were too late when we got there."

"I'm sorry," Sabé said.

He flashed a rueful smile, but the hard edge of elation and discovery had faded from him, and suddenly she felt that he saw her again.

"No there is no one to tell me stop killing bugs. Jocasta could be quite martial when it comes to matters of collecting."

"Do you miss her – Tahl?"

He looked at her, started a sentence and then swallowed it, his face careful, neutral. He was used to smiling, Sabé thought, but any other emotion was held in the inscrutable, pensive mask, hid behind it, and it brought him the time to think, reflect, and perhaps lie.

"There is no death," he finally said, with a kind of relief, "there is no sorrow. There is the force."

And that was that.


	8. Dangerous Wagers

**A/N: **Shifgrethor is borrowed, liberally, again from LeGuin's _Left Hand of Darkness. _Stop reading this now. Go read that book. Well, leave me a review first?

* * *

**Chapter 7: Dangerous Wagers **

_For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror_

_Which we are still just able to endure…_

_Every angel is terrifying._

_-Rilke, First Elegy_

Save for a handful of foreboding prophecies, and one particularly nasty recurring nightmare involving fire and lava (likely a remnant of the incident with Xanatos all those years ago), Obi-Wan Kenobi was only rarely troubled by his dreams. For all his connection to the Unifying force, for all the shades and whirlwinds that at times descended upon him in meditation in the dark voice of the earth and the crashing of waves, his sleep has largely been uneventful and undisturbed by any pressing, earthly worries. Not even the occasional night of captivity, and the lack of amenities involved therein, had the power to rob him of that limp-limbed, deathlike repose of youth.

In later years, when it seemed in the pits of night that the desert was displayed out for no eyes but his alone – in those long years as he grew old and felt the touch of years in his heart, in the long nights when sleep eluded him, in those days he would remember back to the carefree slumber of his youth with something like wonder and envy.

As it was, a young Obi-Wan woke on the morning after the sandstorm with a start, and the falling feeling of something very important having eluded him. The coming day was showing faintly in the rim of brightening blue on the horizon. He pushed his reluctant body off of the bed and staggered to the fresher. The chamber that Obi-Wan shared with his master was not large, as the Naboovian Starship was used for the speedy meeting of heads of state, not for sleepovers. Obi-Wan expected soon to be sleeping on a pallet on the floor, with his master's return. The chamber was not very tall, either, befitting the stature of the people of Naboo. Qui-Gon had been forever hitting his head on various parts of their quarters on the first day that they were here.

Obi-Wan rubbed at the prickly skin on his face, and set about with the razor. The stubble on his chin and cheek, which in his youth had been so recalcitrant in growing, had by now established a speed of growth that could only be described as ferocious. Shaving twice a day was rarely enough.

There were no regulations concerning personal appearances at the temple other than to be clean and respectable, since knights came from all parts of the galaxy, spouting all sorts of hair from all sorts of places. There were those like Mace Windu, who disdained hair of any sort altogether, then there was his master, who sported beard as well as a long mane. Obi-Wan suspected it was not so much a matter of personal preference, as convenience.

In the next room, the commlink beeped, causing Obi-Wan to flinch and nearly cut himself with the blade.

It was Qui-Gon, who looked mildly amused at his Padawan's half-shaven state, then quite offhandedly, as was his wont, outlined the whole of the fantastic plot whereby the slave boy (Anakin) would, in a lucky podrace, win the hyperdrive parts necessary for their passage out of this godforsaken planet.

_This is why I had terrible dreams_, Obi-Wan thought. He was still sleepy and stunned when Qui-Gon finished, and though his rational mind drew up one question after another, his barely-awakened mouth managed to trip over his own words.

"Master – what - I mean, how do you know – that is, how can you be sure the scrap trader could be trusted to uphold his end of the bargain if the boy is successful?"

Across the small screen of the commlink, Qui-Gon listened to Obi-Wan's speech with his head tilted in such a way that signified he was listening to the unspoken parts of Obi-Wan's question.

"Watto has his reputation to mind," Qui-Gon said, the half-smile coming back, "his face, dignity, _shifgrethor_ as they say on the cold planet. And_Anakin_ is very special – his force sensitivity is unlike anything I have ever seen. Obi-Wan, I need you to trust me on this."

And then there were no other words to be said.

"Yes, master," he inclined his head, hoping it should hide the skepticism in his eyes, "I do, master. Master – you would not object, then, to my informing the Queen that their worries should soon be at an end?"

He looked up to see Qui-Gon regarding him with a different gaze, as of someone seeing something new, something he had not realized was there.

"By all means tell them the truth, Obi-Wan. You have a way that sets other people at ease and takes the edge off their alarm. I would be very happy if you should apply that skill liberally to this situation."

Obi-Wan could not help but crack a grin, "And use my hard-earned negotiating skills with our own people, Master?"

"They are not our people, Obi-Wan. For now they need our help, and their path falls parallel to ours for a while."

Obi-Wan checked his smile.

"As you say, Master."

Qui-Gon narrowed his eyes, "days like this, Padawan, when you unflappably tolerate the most outrageous of plans, you make me feel old. I cannot decide whether you think it is sound, or whether you are just doing it to humor me, and no doubt this inscrutability of yours is the sign of a great Jedi. You will see about this hyperdrive, though. I promise you."

"And I have only needed your word, master."

"Very well, Padawan. The Force be with you."

"And with you, Master Qui-Gon."

The blank screen replaced Qui-Gon's wry features, and Obi-Wan became vaguely aware that his shaving foam was dripping off his face and onto his sleeve.

Back in the fresher he looked in the mirror. On half of his face, young man looked back at him, smooth-cheeked, wide-eyed, and on the other half of his face, an old man in a white beard, with the suggestion of age, experience, and wisdom – but also of loss and decrepitude, of words he had not yet unsaid and mistakes not yet made.

For one bewildering instant, Obi-Wan wondered if his biological father had looked anything like him. Or perhaps he had his coloring from his mother, the red hair from her, and the cleft chin. Other people could look in the face of their parents and see the future of their bodies written there in the lines, but not he. Gazing in the mirror now he could imagine it – the beard turning grey, the eyes bleary with sun, the hair thinning from the corners.

But more disturbing he wondered what it would look like to see Qui-Gon age, the long mane growing more white. The day when remembering his master at the time of his apprenticeship would be a distant, almost unbelievable mystery.

Obi-Wan finished his shave and dressed with unusual speed. The aging of the body was not a topic unfamiliar to him, nor the mortality of each living soul. He had meditated on the subject all through his crecheling years and his apprenticeship, and during the same years he had been no stranger to loss and death.

Yet today of all days he felt pain, to imagine the slow leach of time upon the face of his master – what did it mean –

It was getting on six in the morning. Obi-Wan intended a long a thought-clearing session of form and saber practice. The corridors were deserted as he strode toward the hatchway, and passed the shut doors of the throne room, the cockpit, and where the queen slept, and her handmaidens. And passing he thought of her face as he had seen it the evening before, smooth with the agelessness of youth, and he wished that she might, with that smile and those too-wise eyes, escape the ravages of time. How easy she was to talk to. So far he had kept the interactions mostly for her benefit. But Qui-Gon was right. They were not 'our people.'

* * *

Sabé was in the engine room. She had woken with the light of morning, and strangely there was such clarity in the air .The clarity had worked itself into her lungs, and even the spaces in her sight seemed wider, filled with light. There was nothing she wanted more than to get up and do something useful.

Down she went therefore into the engine room, though not before sparing a glance out of the transparisteel windows to the sight of the sun rising like a great wave washing over the dome of the sky. In the far reaches of the horizon the night's moisture billowed up from the yellow sand, and amid the undulating air of morning she found the now-familiar shadow of Obi-Wan. This morning his exercises were slowe, his movements more fluid and controlled as he went through the trained sequence of stretches, punches and kicks.

Even back at the training compound by Theed the soldiers rarely ever awoke early to train, to put themselves through something which others would no doubt demand of them later. It would take enthusiasm and dedication of such constancy as to be inhuman to do as Obi-Wan did, every morning. And she recognized behind the graceful movement of his arms, the kicks and spins lovely to behold but a terror to withstand, was a discipline and tradition of such power as to command the near-unquestioning effort and obedience of two of the most able men that she had ever met.

Suddenly she envied them for it: for having found a master, and a cause great enough and true enough to serve with all of their heart, for all their lives. And it had been so obvious to them, from the beginning. Little wonder Jedi Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi believed in fate; fate had taken an active interest in his life from the very moment that he was born.

Then the blazing body of the sun broke over the horizon, and Sabé blinked for the brightness of it, and then, shaking her head to clear it of the thoughts, she descended the staircase into the engine hold.

Her own life perhaps was made of broken narratives. She had drifted on the edge of beingness and use, the weight of responsibility leaning and then leaving her, as if she strayed the returned to the center of things. She was not like Obi-Wan, Sabé thought, and then the absurdity of ever having to make that distinction struck her as vaguely humorous. Since when had she wanted to be Obi-Wan?

There was work to do in the engine room, and so she went. None of the astromech droids were now left in the starship, R2D2 having departed with Padmé and Qui-Gon, and the others shot to pieces. There would be no mechanical help in terms of repairs and navigational computing.

She spent the next hour in general clean up and maintenance, tapping open the panels on the engine gauge. With her multi-tipped screwdriver and pressure checker, went about tightening and checking.

She headed back upstairs as soon as she heard light turn on that signaled the use of the fresher in the crew's quarters. Back in their own room, she caught the raised eyebrows of Eirtaé, whose skeptical glance then shifted to her oil-stained hands, and ducked into the fresher herself.

She emerged to the two other handmaidens looking aghast at Padmé's message carrying over the waves.

"He did what?" spots of color splashed wine-red on Eirtaé's thin cheeks, "and you let him? Padmé, this is insanity anyway you cut it. I don't care if the _boy_is Saint Ailla himself – "

At which Rabé, with a deliberate movement, jostled Eirtaé out of the way of the commlink. Sabé came alongside.

"I'm not happy about it either, Rabé," Padmé said.

"We can give his padawan some hell about it," Rabé replied, though Sabé could see that she was fighting off her own surprise, "But that is the most we here could do."

"Not like that will help us at all," Padmé said, "though it might make me feel a little better. Sabé – Master Jinn just struck a bargain to get us out of here – "

"A risky one, I take it?"

"A bet on today's podrace, if our driver wins, we get the hyperdrive. If not…well, the local scrap trader gets our ship."

"Ailla protect us all."

* * *

It seemed like a stunt some young, untried, cocky man would pull, Sabé thought with confusion. Thankfully Padmé had warned them this morning, or she thought that she would not be able to keep her composure as Obi-Wan related his news to them in the well-lit interior of the Throne room.

He was at his most charming this morning, spending a little of that charisma that he had kept furled inside himself like nascent wings. He had cleaned his uniform, washed his hair until it shone. As vouchsafe for his trustworthiness, this morning the pride sat on his features and made them glow white and gold in the filtered sunlight of the Tatooine desert. The eyes, clearer than usual, seemed to alight on the things it touched like a bird of prey. He looked like one of the young lords of Theed, who strode through the archways of the palace with straight shoulders and a gaze that did not waver, so sure he was of his balance on the earth upon which he stood.

Obi-Wan sketched a very smart bow, and looking up his lips curled in a grin. His eyes damn near twinkled.

Sabé blinked.

She knew when she was being glamored out of her wits, now especially after training with Padmé. But as she looked back at Obi-Wan it was more than a little difficult to keep her features impassive, unaffected. His geniality this morning was infectious; the desire to grin back at him was suddenly overwhelming. Vaguely she noted her mouth go suddenly dry.

"And how exactly does Master Jinn plan to acquire the hyperdrive by tomorrow, Jedi Kenobi?"

"He is taking a calculated risk, Your Royal Highness," the blue eyes held hers by some invisible bond, "he made a wager against a local scrapper Watto. When our racer wins at the podrace today, we will have the hyperdrive."

All this said with the utmost confidence, as if the alternatives were too unlikely to consider.

"And surely there is a thing wagered on our side, Jedi Kenobi? What should happen then, in the event that our racer loses?"

He stood his ground.

"Risks must be taken, Your Royal Highness. But we are not betting on any simpleton racer – Anakin is a force sensitive, indeed he has the highest level of force sensitivity that anyone has ever encountered. His intelligence is near genius levels, and his knack with machines almost uncanny. Qui-Gon has wagered Your Royal Highness's ship – but without the hyperdrive, having the ship itself would do us little good, Ma'am. The odds, as well as logic, are both in our favor."

"And have you considered a course of action, should this plan fail?"

"Without a doubt, your Royal Highness. Your safety and that of your crew are of the utmost importance to us, and our assignment is to take you before the 500 Republica in Courscant as speedily as possible. This plan of action, though with its measure of risk, is the most efficient way to accomplish both goals."

He looked around at all of them, clear eyes blazing. Behind her Sabé felt Rabé suck in her breath, and even Eirtaé's usual fidgeting had calmed to the preternatural stillness of utter focus. Calm and certainty radiated from Obi-Wan, and even Captain Panaka was not frowning more than usual, Sabé noticed.

"Our paths have fallen together, your Royal Highness," Kenobi continued, training his hypnotic eyes back on Sabé, and ever word from his mouth was rounded and charged with intent, "We are bound until the end of this road, until peace has been restored to your planet. Therefore, I must ask you to trust me, Your Royal Highness. I must ask that you trust me, and wait – with hope."

Concluding, he inclined his head respectfully to her, and stood still with hands clasped before him in a position of humble supplication. The room was still as a tableau.

He believed it, too, Sabé thought; and then, irrelevantly, as the blood pounded in her ears, that the look of intense concentration he had trained on them had the same elements of that contained power as when he had looked into the box of insect specimens.

Panaka gave her a curt nod, nostrils flared with the expression of a man convinced full against his will, and Sabé spoke, feeling her voice fill the space, the void and vacuum left in the wake of Obi-Wan.

"We have not doubted your heart, Jedi Kenobi, only your methods. For you efforts you have our thanks. And for what is to come, we will wait together."

She noticed when he lifted his head that the corners of his eyes had turned up with his smile. Sweat beaded on the back of her neck as she fought the compulsion – very much a tangible compulsion – to smile back.

"You may go now."

"That trickster – oh there is no word for what he is! Despicable!"

"Eirtaé," Rabé muttered.

"What?" Eirtaé pursed her mouth and flashed her eyes, her cheeks had turned white with ire, "no doubt he used one of those Jedi mind-games on us. Sabé actually thanked him for his efforts. Utterly disgraceful. His fool of a master had bet _our_ ship in a wager, and was thanked for his pains. If they can be so persuasive with us, why can he not practice one of his tricks on the local scrap dealer and just take the hyperdrive?"

It was some hours after the audience, when everyone had gotten their edge back. Waiting for a distant podrace to decide their fate was not a hopeful business, Sabé reflected. If anything it was irritating as all hell, and tempers grew shorter and shorter. She was standing in the corner of the throne room, massaging her neck as it strained under the weight of the heavy red-black-brocade headdress, staying out of the way as Rabé and Eirtaé argued.

"Eirtaé, be reasonable. The Jedi had obvious made the decision already, and if Padmé couldn't think of a better way – if our Queen is going along with this, there is nothing for us to do but to wait. You saying these things is not helpful in the least."

"Contrary to what your tone suggests, Rabé, I am not a complete dimwit. They might be the actors in this little drama, but at least we didn't have to take it as if we were on the same side. Sabé, you could at least not have been simple enough to _thank_ him for his idiocy. Think what kinds of behavior that might allow for in the future. Obviously your training hasn't sunk in far enough for the simple expression of dignity to get through to you. Perhaps it never will."

Much as Sabé did not like to admit, it stung. Eirtaé had ever been the expert on deportment and reticence. Her royal upbringing had given her a mask, diamond hard and polished to a cutting edge. Sabé swallowed hard and bit down on her angry retort.

"Eirtaé, you were in that room," Rabé said, "you felt what was happening. If it wasn't some special Jedi power, then call it pure charisma. Face it, he was more persuasive that you or me at our best."

"I am not denying that, Rabé. That man's words could stop a war before it starts, if he uses them right. But this hardly sets a good precedent, to yield to his powers of persuasion – to allow him a place to play with his rhetoric and force us back into a position of thankful beneficiaries."

But her anger had run its course. Sabé watched as Eirtaé reassembled the smooth façade of cool aristocratic indifference.

"But you are right about this," Eirtaé said, looking at Sabé again, "now it is just the waiting. And perhaps there is a god you can pray to get us out of this mess."

Eirtaé was always fond of her parting shots, Sabé thought. She watched as the tall handmaiden strode from the throne room, her jaw tight, her chin a sharp jut in the air.

"She is very determined to be contrary today," Rabé said into the silence, "I hope she didn't upset you too much."

Sabé gave her a grateful smile, "Eirtaé believes in the appearance. It's not…a consideration I am used to making."

"You mean that she's not her head so firmly wrapped in the nobility's games that she can't give it a break even when it is time," Rabé said.

"The mask is a part of who she is," Sabé said, "it is a skill she cannot ignore. But I know – well, at least I think I know, that she means well. Else she would not be here; nor would she even bother to yell at me. It's just that all of this – it's all rather new – and how some people live, and how they think – it is bewildering," she finished.

Rabé sighed, brown eyes flashing distractedly to the desert outside; running a hand through her hair. "Nobility, appearance, protocol – to Eirtaé these things are more important than what actually happens. Like those generals of old who could talk composedly about bombing each other to smithereens, then bow and affect elaborate customs of respect and then go ahead and actually do it five minutes later. In fact there were probably more than a few of those in her family."

Sabé smiled, "never say that you would live despite dishonor?"

"There is a part of honor, restraint, and equanimity that is virtue," Rabé said, "But it's like what Ric Olié was saying, these are different times. We are up against those who are not constrained by any of our laws – and not to say that we should throw them all out the window. These people do not find important that which we find important. So we should throw some laws away, but only the ones that we cling to not because they make sense, but because they are there, and have been there since the beginning."

Her eyes flickered down, then fixed themselves on Sabé again, "I just never believed that there was a real chance I, or my family, might not survive this."

Sabé had nothing to say, to that.

"So I am very glad that you are decoy," Rabé continued with barely a pause, "I would be quite paralyzed. You have done well, Sabé. That you are not weighed down by the thoughts of loved ones in Naboo is a boon for you, to have no attachments."

Rabé sniffed and a glint came back in her eyes, "no attachments – almost like that Jedi. If he hadn't been trying so hard to make us all go along with his scheme demurely and without a fight, I would have quite sworn that he was flirting with you, you know."

To her everlasting mortification, Sabé turned beet red.

The commlink chose that very opportune moment to ring, saving Sabé from a doubtless poorly executed reply.

Padmé was beaming on the other end of it.

Sabé and Rabé looked at each other, stunned. The news, so long one terrible thing after another, had finally took a turn for the good. And when Obi-Wan arrived later, beaming, to make his report, Sabé allowed herself a smile. It was a little after noon local time. The hyperdrive should arrive with the victorious party at sometime after three, and they would make their long delayed departure to Coruscant later that very evening.


	9. That which is Impossible

A/N: In which Sabé plays with Obi-Wan's lightsaber. In a strictly professional capacity, of course.

* * *

**Chapter 8: That Which is Impossible**

_For our own heart _

_always exceeds us_

_as theirs did._

_- Rilke, Second Elegy_

It always made Obi-Wan feel old when his master – more than two decades his senior – managed to pull off something so outrageous, something almost juvenile, that it wasn't within the reaches of his own imagination to even consider it, much less make it work. He had the notion that most council members had trouble with Qui-Gon for the very same reason. They did not realize how old and set in their ways they had become until Qui-Gon Jinn swept through the hall, long hair billowing behind him, all risk and flash and brilliant intuition. Troublemaker, like the dervishes that shared his name.

And for the same reason Obi-Wan loved Qui-Gon, though he would never admit it openly. His mentor retained the ability to surprise, to adapt to situations, whereas Obi-Wan had long noticed a tendency in himself to stick to regulations, to close in face of surprises.

It was early afternoon and Obi-Wan was in the engine room, making it ready for the new parts of the hyperdrive. The place was more spotless than he had remembered it, every part humming in some incomprehensible mechanical synchrony. He thought he detected the force signature of the Queen, and smiled at the thought of her here in full make up and battle regalia, flipping her screwdriver, and tapping at the controls with seasoned expertise, totally focused.

He caught himself wondering if he might see her again, and felt Qui-Gon's words come back to him, this time with a force wholly unforeseen. _They are not our people, Obi-Wan._

He had found an agreeable girl to speak to, Obi-Wan told himself; a companion in a place far from home. Duty was returning with flow of the force; changes instituting themselves, inevitable. Best to put it from his mind, and focus. His life was not one for lasting attachments, and perhaps neither was hers. Yet even as he plied himself with this series of short, bracing lectures he could not keep from feeling that sense of loss brought to him by the resolution.

* * *

"And have you all behaved yourselves when I was gone?" said Padmé, a shade or two darker than they last saw her, breezing through the door of the throne room. Her eyes sparkled with mischief and she moved with the reckless, excited grace of a young girl harboring a great secret.

But before she could get another word out, the ship made a high hum like the sound of a thousand stinging bees, and then spewed itself out of the sand with a violent heave. Sabé grabbed at the side of a chair, and grasped Padmé's arm with her other hand.

Ric Olié's gravelly tones came over the loud speakers, "Emergency take-off, we're flying low to pick up the remaining passengers. Please everyone sit down and buckle in."

They all ignored the last part of the instructions, but headed toward the windows to get a glimpse outside.

"There they are," cried Rabé.

The desert sands, yellow at morning and blood-red in the sunset, was at early afternoon a blinding white. Though the smoky heat and the stabbing light on the portside window, Sabé made out two brighter blades of light locked in an intricate dance, flashing one against the other.

The shadowy figures that wielded the blades came into view, one whose robes were like the sand dunes and the other its dark counterpart. They were coming very close now that Sabé could hear above the deep bone-shaking roar of the ignition thrusters the sound of their blades, a sustained, wide-banded hum from the green one that adjusted the range and pitch as its wielder whirled and spun and ducked. But the other, the red, its sound furled and flickered like a spitting fire, and though the blade shone steady the energy of it came and wavered, and surged on in blasts of undisciplined passions. It was a dark blade, the second. Sabé shuddered at the sound, beating tattoos of it on her mind. And from the looks of the one who wielded it – it was not meant to be a clean blade.

And then the green light vanished, snatched from the desert by the starship. The thrusters engaged to a full atmospheric burn and Sabé heard the squeaky clicks of the space adaptors as they adjusted for the angle of ascent.

The blip of the red blade was left far behind in the desert, at once buried in the air and the distance between them. The shield generator fluttered to life as they cleared the atmosphere and fell into the soundless void that was space. Sabé did not think she would ever get used to the startling change of it, moving from earth to greatest freedom, the peace of the black dusted with stars.

Cabin lights flicked on, with it came Olié's voice, much more relaxed than before.

"All aboard, Your Royal Highness, calibrating for the jump into hyperspace. We should arrive in Coruscant in about eight hours, or 1400 galactic time in their part of the world."

* * *

As they prepared for sleep, and Padmé regaled the handmaidens with the things she had seen while they stewed in the ship. The sand and heat every where, she said, and the type and color of riffraff that was cultivated on Tatooine would find their homes in probably no other parts of the civilized inner core worlds. Sabé had found the planet dangerous, bleak, but also exciting, full of hidden revelations. But it was neither the time nor place for her to share that.

Mostly Padmé talked about Anakin – not straight on, except to briefly describe what he looked like, but he found ways of seeping in, usually what he had said, and parts of what he had done – in a way to suggest the boy's persona had impressed itself deeply on Padmé's mind. Her brilliant mind had ever found the things in the world that were hypocritical and ridiculous, had now found something almost of equal brilliance and hardness, a companion.

Rabé and Eirtaé listened and offered interjections, especially at the pod race, while Sabé listened without comment, her mind already on the next part of their plan, on the meeting with Senator Palpatine – at the flight deck, the last open area, the last area of danger, the last place that she would have to be someone other than herself. They would get help then, from the Senate, and there would no longer be any need for the Jedi. Padmé would be parted from her young friend and Sabé would be parted from – well. Such was the way of things in the world; everything passed, everything moved on.

Yet somehow, for some reason or another she could not rest that evening, an even when the cabin lights dimmed and the girls settled down to their respective pallets Sabé could only watch as the milky-silver light of distant stars passed through the royal quarters, illumined the dark shapes motionless in sleep.

She finally dozed after shifting her ears to the smooth-running chord that was the new hyperdrive, and only to be woken by the other song, this song of the red blade, the feeling hissing and spitting, the touch of the tone like the sensation of a never-ending fall, at the center of it – if she could describe sounds like colors – in the center was a great, bubbling darkness. The tattoo of its irregular beat pounded in her sleeping ears and she sat straight up an hour into the prescribed six-hour rest.

She drew out of the sleeping bag, and gathering the handmaiden's flame hood about her shoulders, padded barefoot out of the Royal Quarters. The strange, thawing buzz of the red saber still strummed its counter melody against all her internal rhythms. She walked to the kitchen, and was in the process of making herself a cup of tea before she took note of the figure sitting in the shadows.

A pair of eyes gleamed in the darkness.

"Your Royal Highness," said Obi-Wan Kenobi, pushing back his hood.

Sabé's heart rate must have jumped to some unhealthy number, given the extent of her start. She closed her eyes briefly to compose herself, then blinked owlishly.

"Good evening to you as well, Jedi Kenobi."

"What disturbs your rest at his hour? " he asked drawing back the hood from his features and rising, slowly, surfacing from the dark corner of the dining area into her level, her little spot of light. She sensed that his mood was not at its usual jovial, twinkling pitch – there it was in the slow way he moved, in the drawn look under his eyes.

"I might ask the same of you," she said, keeping her voice even.

"I was…meditating," he said, with half a smile.

"In the kitchen?"

He flashed her an unreadable look, glanced down, "the guest quarters are a little crowded at the moment."

"Of course, with the addition to our crew."

"Yes," he said.

She glanced at him surreptitiously, noting the novel way in which his brows contracted, then smoothed out, as if fighting a particularly disagreeable thought. He would have a fierce frown when he's older, she thought. Each emotion, when they did fit over his face, engaged it so totally, radiated from it even, as a prism spills the thousand colors upon a screen. Such was the infectiousness of his laughing face, and now was the gloomy pall of his darker moods. She fought against the weight of his thoughts, over spilling.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked, and when he looked up at her as if surprised she was still there.

"Yes, tea," she replied, enunciating perhaps what was more than perfectly necessary.

"Oh," he said, "oh well, then. Yes, please. Tea, I mean. Thank you, Your Royal – "

"Enough," Sabé said, "we are friends now, are we not, Jedi Kenobi?"

"And friends may not observe the rules of correct etiquette, Madam? Shall I call you by your given name, and you call me by mine?"

Now that as almost hostile, Sabé thought, until looking up she saw the wry, apologetic twist of his mouth. They neither of them could dispense with the formalities – he for the way of his life has taken, and she – because she did not, technically exist. She looked down, and poured the boiling water into the two cups.

"You're right, of course," she said, "Your Royal Highness it shall remain."

He sighed. And silence fell over them, it was as if she could sense what he was thinking, and to mention anything else in conversation would seem gross and abrasive.

"It is not the stim tea that you prefer," she said, "it is a brew from Naboo to soothe, not to stimulate. But I think you will like it."

She pushed a mug toward him, the heavy earthenware surface pleasantly warm as the water's heat seeped through. And to her surprise he took it with both hands, the long fingers hard with calluses closing over her knuckles.

He did not look up at her, but said, "It would be my honor to be counted among your friends."

And Sabé's heart went out to him, and he seemed to her suddenly alone, orphaned despite the greatness of his cause, confused, even sometimes capable of bad manners.

She said, "I could not sleep because I could not get the sound of the red blade out of my head."

Obi-Wan's eyes jumped to hers. "What do you mean?"

"Your master wields a green lightsaber. It sings when he uses it, the chords are harmonious – point and counterpoint, all pure tone. The core of it is bright, dazzling. Not so the red blade, though it also has great power, but it strums and beats with darker, unreasoning passions. Its core is darkness."

She looked at him, noting the incredulity in his face, but saying it nonetheless.

"It follows us, the red blade."

"How do you know this?"

"I told you, it's my knack," she tried to explain, but he shook his head, grimness pulling at the corners of his mouth.

"I can't believe that."

A wild sort of plan occurred to her. "Hand me your saber," she said, and when he hesitated, "relax, I won't try to eviscerate you, Jedi Kenobi. Trust me."

He reached into his robes and retrieved the silver cylinder – so innocuous seeming in the light of the kitchen.

"Will you turn it on?"

Electric blue blazed suddenly in the darkness. It shone so brightly to hurt her eyes, and across the way she saw him look uncertainly at her.

"Trust me," she said again. A hum filled the air, as if they between their bodies made a chamber for the sound to echo in. When Sabé listened she could hear the music of the blade, the crystals each a tone, a tower of sound invisible, ringing the air one against the other.

And the tone grew stronger; Sabé felt the clasps of her mind become undone, eroded, all the silences and worries melded, flowed into the rushing stream of which she had found the pulse, in the night's music. For a great and enduring instant she could sense the core of that brilliant blue tone, and she sang to it a note that complemented the core, a strong harmony and felt - though she could say how – she felt the blade sing back.

Obi-Wan felt in his hand his lightsaber of these many years grow warm, almost scalding him, then deadly cool, and heard the voice coming as if out of the desert, a voice of the sand and wind and stars, it seemed, and then the blade flashed a brilliant white, a white core that emerged out of the blue. He had never seen that happen before. As he sat still with the ice-cold handle extended before him, the blade's beam seemed to break into two, a swirl of blinding white, and the sound blending, melding almost into his bones.

Across the river of light Sabé looked young, yet ageless; in that peaceful smile there was a suggestion of eternity. But then her eyes fluttered with the avian agitation of birds in the spring, and the frown of concentration sent little ripples across the façade of her static beauty. "Gods," he whispered, "you've made the crystals glow at their second resonance frequency. That's impossible."

She stopped her song. The lights seemed too trickle back into his field of vision, and Obi-Wan deactivated his blade and clipped it back into his belt.

The Queen looked at him, looking as surprised as he must look. "What I wanted to say was – the red blade is the dark twin. In so many ways it is identical: in the seeming it is the same, but not at the core. At the core it is not like this, but dark, whispering, powerful."

"It's Sith," Obi-Wan breathed.

"What's going on?" said a small voice from the shadow of a doorway. Anakin emerged, the coppery light from the kitchen gleaming on his newly washed hair.

"Hi," Sabé said, watching the young boy as he made his way quietly to the table, and quieted her own unruly thoughts, "would you like some tea?"

He made a face, "Yes, thank you. No wait. Not if it's that terrible stuff that Qui-Gon drinks."

Sabé laughed, "No, I will have none of that here, don't you worry. Try this."

She stirred a spoonful of sugar into her own cup of dark tea, and pushed it over to Anakin.

"Hmm," he thought for a moment as he rolled the taste of it on his tongue, "I like it." A smile, bright and guileless as the sun. "Thank you," he said, taking a deeper gulp, "every one's been so nice here. You're very nice too."

Then Anakin cocked his head over to the side, "you look a lot like Padmé." Of course, only through the eyes of a child, Sabé thought.

"Do I?"

He grinned toothily at her, "yes, and that means you're very pretty too. But you are the queen, and I probably shouldn't say that. It's my pleasure to meet you, Queen Amidala. My name is Anakin Skywalker."

"My honor to meet you, Anakin."

He glanced at Obi-Wan, who calmly sipped his tea, and Sabé, then outside, through the small transparisteel window to the stars.

"How far are we now, from Tatooine?"

Sabé pitied him, "some light-years, I think."

"Oh," he said.

"Do you miss your home?" Anakin cast Obi-Wan a surreptitious glance, as if gauging the force of the other's judgment, then shook his head.

But Obi-Wan – whatever his meditation had been, rose to the challenge.

"I think it is perfectly natural to miss your home, Anakin."

The boy looked at him, "Do you miss yours?"

Obi-Wan shook his head, "I don't remember it. I was only a baby when I arrived at the temple."

Anakin's eyes filled with compassion, "I'm sorry. That's terrible for you."

Sabé knew it took a great deal of training for Obi-Wan's eyebrows not to shoot up into his hair.

"Were you an orphan?" Anakin asked.

"No," Obi-Wan said, "I was a younger son, and I passed the midichlorian level for entry into the temple. My birth parents took me there."

"Why would they do that?"

"They wanted me to have a good life," Obi-Wan said, "or at least, a better one."

This Anakin understood. "Like my mom," he said, "she wants the best for me, too."

"You will have friends in the temple, Anakin."

"I know. Qui-Gon says that too. But I would be sad, if I never knew my mom, like you. Will Padmé be there?"

"Uh..."

"No, she can't be," Anakin finished his sentence, "She's not a force-sensitive, like us."

The last glance included Sabé, to her bewilderment.

"I am not force-sensitive, Anakin."

"Maybe not in the same way, but you are something – I can feel it. Otherwise how can you make Obi-Wan's lightsaber turn white?"

"How indeed?" Obi-Wan whispered. Sabé took the chance to refill their cups.

"We were all tested for midichlorians as babes," she said, "and Naboo is a core planet."

The subject was dropped, but two pairs of disbelieving eyes looked at her over the rims of their respective mugs with two equal expressions of skepticism. Sabé bent her head, retreated further back into her hood to hide her confusion.

They bade goodnight soon thereafter, Obi-Wan now with a protective hand over Anakin's back, to guide him back to the guest quarters, and Sabé, with a mouthful of things unsaid, thanks unvoiced. It occurred to her briefly that perhaps Obi-Wan might never know her real name now. That which he called their friendship could be completely lost to history, shorn of all its identifying features, as if it never happened, as if it were another life, another Sabé who lived it. One who did not have impossible hopes.

But walking back to the Queen's quarters, Sabé realized that her fingers still tingled, not from the humming lightsaber, but from where Obi-Wan's fingers had touched her, on the backs of her hands. It was then she realized that though her mind was filled with adages of change and of letting go, her heart had already set itself on dreaming the impossible.


	10. By My True Name

A/N: In which there are dark bars, handsome strangers, and Jawa Juice.

* * *

**Chapter 9: By My True Name**

_And even if one of them pressed me_

_Suddenly against his heart:_

_I would be consumed in that _

_Overwhelming existence_

_-Rilke, First Elegy_

Their second day in Coruscant; Padmé had appeared in state before the senate, and today she was to meet with a select group of senators with a more vested interest in Naboovian affairs. Sabé had very little knowledge of, and even less interest in, political maneuvering. Though she understood the import of Padmé's call for a vote of no confidence on Chancellor Valorum, her intuitions about the man had been the complete opposite. She had liked him on sight. And if Sabé could not trust her own intuition about people, it was very difficult for her to come to a rational opinion.

The thought of another full day of speeches and negotiations had been akin to torture. Sabé was not sure she could last another day without incurring some sort of intergalactic incident by falling asleep during the council. By pure serendipity, Captain Panaka granted her the afternoon for more extensive training with blasters and other types of shooting weapons while Rabé and Eirtaé accompanied Padmé on her visits.

"One handmaiden on each side matches better, anyway," said the disgruntled captain of Security as Sabé's face lit up in relief, as he was well aware of the Decoy's lack of interest in the political field.

"I expect you to be in the practice halls this whole afternoon, do you hear? Your skills in that particular area must be impeccable," he said, and made a few calls.

Sabé expected he already had some other plan up his snug, leather sleeves, as Panaka delivered her to the marksman academy in one of the seedier parts of Theed. The lazy-eyed instructor in his mid-thirties had regarded Panaka with the wry grin of an old acquaintance, but with such a shrewdness that suggested their last meeting had not been an amiable affair.

"This is Dengar Duel, one of the worst smugglers to come out of Corellia in decades," said Captain Panaka by way of introduction.

Duel's eyes slitted in obvious dislike, but his lips curled in a wry grin, "My skills had nothing to do with it, Panaka. You were lucky, probably more than you've ever been in your entire dutiful and utterly boring life. But he is a good shooter, I'll give him that," Panaka said in his usual monotone that Sabé was beginning to suspect at times contained hints of sarcasm, impatience, and even humor.

"See here, Panaka," said the Corellian, as the Captain of Security launched into a list of objectives and skills that Sabé was to be trained in, "If the lass knows how to shoot, then she does. And if she can't aim to save her life, then at least I'll teach her to duck. You've given me 4 hours. Don't expect miracles, hear? This damn planet moves fast enough without you here to egg it along."

Captain Panaka left in a huff, muttering what sounded like _Corellian_ under his breath.

Dengar Duel fixed his beady eyes, a hard, shiny black, on Sabé, "you work for that man, Lass?"

"I do."

"Don't envy you," he said, shaking his head, "but Panaka's a straight shooter. No imagination but plenty of responsibility. Well, we should probably get started, then."

The inside of the academy had simulation chambers in addition to a few blaster-proof rooms with singed walls for combat training, and a large and impressive shooting range with variable atmospheric conditions that could be set with the flip of a switch: high winds, snow, hail, even tropical storm.

Sabé needn't have worried about her shooting skills. She realized at once that she had a steady arm, and avoiding blasts were easy when she could hear the high whinnying sound of the shots, clear as day.

"Blimey," said Duel, after a third round of blaster evasion had left him huffing for breath and Sabé totally unscathed.

"I _will_ take credit for this, when I send you back to Panaka."

Duel was a Corellian on foreign soil, settled down to make a mostly-legitimate business after his run-ins with various police systems in the galaxy had grown to be too much of a nuisance.

"After the Jedi got involved once, I gave it up. Too much trouble to have the force-sensitives on your tail," Duel said, "and I had a pair of the most annoyingly self-righteous, philosophical bastards with the worst sense of humor."

Foreign soil or not, it didn't make him swear any less.

Dengar Duel, true to his self-professed "creative streak", decided to run Sabé through some of the training modules with a blind fold (the blaster simulation turned to the lowest setting, of course). And when she still successfully dodged the enemy bolt, and shooting mostly in the right direction, managed to hit a couple of targets purely by chance, he laughed, a big, jovial belly laugh that belied his thinness, and declared grandly that he'd have married her for just those reflexes, had she not been an _ekster_.

Sabé thought it better not to ask. It was, however, the first time that anyone offered to marry her. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant.

"You've two hours more with me, Lass," Duel said, chewing on the stump of his cig," but I've got nothing more to teach ye. There must be better things to do in this city than sit around here with a dirty Corellian – a floating zoo somewhere, I'm sure, and Dexter's pub's nearby. Dex's a good sort. Not too legal, but his heart's big as a star, and truer. And he gets the strangest crowd in his pub. Tell him the Corellian sent you, and don't drink the Jawa juice."

When she protested, half-thinking of the look on Captain Panaka's face if he realized what she was doing with this allotted time, Duel cracked a rogue grin.

"Och, lass. No life was ever lived under so much meddling by another. Take the time."

He took down her number, saying that he'd use it to contact her if Panaka came for her early, while grinning a rakish grin that said he'd put it to some other use. Closing the door of her floating taxi, Duel flapped one black eyelid in what he must have thought was a debonair wink, and sent Sabé on the way to Dexter's.

So she found herself, after another stomach-turning but exhilarating cab ride, at one of the lower levels. A crowded, low-lit pub buzzed with activity at the foot of a high-rise business center. Parking abounded for interplanetary transports of all makes and sizes. And every now and then she heard a woman's laugh from inside.

Sabé pulled the edges of her cloak higher up about her as she stepped into the dimly lit interior. The sudden smell of oily food and the astringent tang of alcohol assailed her.

"Well dearie, haven't seen you here before. And new to Coruscant, by the looks of ye. What would you like?"

The menu was written in a jumble of unfamiliar words. She looked at the waitress, who was peeking up her hood very curiously.

"Dengar Duel referred me to this place," she said, "but I'm not sure what's –"

"That Dirty Corellian," boomed a great voice from her right, and turning Sabé saw the great pot-bellied figure of someone who could be no other than Dexter.

"You know him, miss?" Rumbled the massive owner, "and did he send ye with the money?"

Sabé must have turned white, struck speechless by the idea of what unfortunate things were to befall her when she said she didn't and secretly cursing Dengar Duel to the seventh circle of Aillia's dungeon, for Dexter and the red-haired woman laughed uproariously.

"Did you see her face – oh Dex!"

And the alien was clutching his great belly with all four of his arms, big globs of tears squeezing from between his eyes.

"Oh, no offense miss. No offense at all, just a long day in need of a joke," the big owner chortled, and slapped Sabé on the back with enough force to dislodge her ribs from her spine.

They set her up at a table near the back, and went to fetch some food. Free of charge, as Dex boomed, for the Corellian only sends his friends, and Dex was still paying him off for a favor done in the not-so-distant past.

Soon enough there was enough on her table to feed the whole restaurant, with enough oil on it perhaps to run the Nuros for a week. Dexter himself ambled over and plopped a giant mug of some steaming, foul-smelling liquid on her table.

"Jawa Juice," he rumbled with a smile, "our hottest item. Made only from freshly-squeezed Jawas."

Sabé looked at the brown liquid to see bits of floating chunks with what looked like hair spouting off of them.

"Now miss, did that dirty old Dengar send you over just for the food, or are you one of his friends, waiting to talk to Kenobi?"

The name stopped her growing queasiness.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi?"

"Is there another one?" Dexter rolled his saucer-plate eyes, "only one such nagging, ginger-haired, Jedi nuisance in the place. You should see him walking here – striding right in as if his owns the place, charming the wits out of my regular customers – and what does he tell them? That eating so much stuff so high in oil is not good for them. You're here to see him, then? I thought so; by the looks of ye when first came in I said to myself, well Dex, that's not one of yours. It's one of the Jedi's informants if ever I'd seen one."

All this said, of course, at the normal volume of Dexter's voice, which in addition to vibrating from inside her bones had the virtue of carrying over the whole length of the pub.

"No, I am not here to see Jedi Kenobi," Sabé said quickly, "we are acquaintances, but I'm here – because Dengar Duel suggested it."

She kept the bit about the Jawa Juice to herself.

Dexter's face split in a wide grin, "well then you are welcome here at Dexter's Diner anytime you happen in Coruscant, Miss. By the looks of ye I'd say you're not from these parts. Somewhere with a lot of water, and pretty things in the forests. Naboo?"

She was surprised.

Dexter seemed amused, "We get a right variety of people around here, and I never forget a face, Miss. Especially one as pretty as yours. Enjoy your meal, then," And Dexter ambled away, slinging a great towel around his midriff in the manner of a wrestler having won some prized championship.

Sabé glanced at her watch; there was one hour and forty-five minutes left before she had to report back. She poked experimentally at the dish closest to her, which looked like pieces of potato floating in a brown sauce, and discovered she had no idea what it was – only that it was hot and oily, and more tasty than she had thought.

Dexter had put her near the back of the restaurant, where the noise was not loud enough to burst her eardrums. The wall behind her was soundproof, she realized. A perfect table to hear everything that went on in the diner, without one's own conversation being overheard. An informant's table. Informant to the Jedi.

She was vaguely amused to think of Obi-Wan in this raucous place. The three–piece band in the corner had just started some tuneless, hard-beat song, and the milling throng around the bar cleared away as the first batch of customers subsided, then filled again as the second wave crowded up to the spaces left open by the first. Through it she caught occasional glimpses of the red hair of the woman that own the bar with Dex. Dex himself was in charge of the grills from behind the counter; he sang and dumped mixing bowls filled with ingredients into the sizzling pan, where they splashed in the oil and made a fierce frying sound. The smell of fried onions rose in the room.

Most of conversation in the room was held in Basic, Sabé noticed, though there were more than a few languages that she could not understand. From her excellent listening vantage she kept her eyes on the food and eavesdropped on at least five of the conversations happening around her.

The price of water was going up in the lower districts, said one grungy looking human to his alien companion, while the other related the vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum, and the Naboovians making trouble around the 500 republica.

"As if we need anymore trouble around here," said the human, and spat directly in the way of the droid waitress that was crossing his path. She stepped out of the way, and carrying her loaded tray moved – to Sabé's increasing embarrassment – to stop in front of her.

"Oh dear," the mechanical voice quipped, "I don't think there is enough room here for all this."

The droid tried to back up, and a messy whirling of gears ensued during which she got nowhere.

"Oh I'm sorry miss," she said, her voice colored with some embarrassment, "I've not been able to back up for about a week now, and Dex hasn't figured out what's been wrong. Can you push your table a little forward so I can make a turn?"

First, Sabé doubted that her fully loaded table could take any sort of jostling before all the dishes tumbled in her lap. Second, she was curious.

"Do you mind if I take a look?" Sabé said.

The droid looked at her with all the skepticism that the metal face could muster. Then she heaved a sigh.

"Everyone's a mechanic in Coruscant," she said, and stacking the dishes down on top of the mountain of food already accumulating at Sabé's table, tapped open the control panel at around her left forearm.

"I'm programmed to fix myself, miss," the droid said to her, "but for some reason it didn't feel like anything was wrong."

Nor was there anything wrong, as far as Sabé could see. The colorful wiring was neat and the control chip – if not brand new, was still serviceable. Nonetheless she tapped two fingers on the droid's wrist, and hummed.

Two minutes later, with the help of a clean fork and a straw, Sabé fished out the giant blob of cooking grease from inside the droid's side panel. It was a somewhat disturbing sight; the ball was about as large as her fist, with dust and hair stuck on it, though Sabé guessed it was probably equally disturbing as the thought of drinking the Jawa Juice.

The droid, whose name was Maureen, did some maneuvering and realized that her full range of motion had been restored, after which she nearly flew to the back counter where Dex was working, hollering all the way, "Dex! She fixed me! The little girl fixed me!"

It was certainly not the most dignified of affairs, Sabé realized as the big owner came bounding up the aisle again to shake her hand in a bone-crushing grip, before commanding a song in her honor from the three-piece band, which obliged by crowding around her and launching into a very off-tune version – sometimes fading into silence as all three of the players forgot the next part – of the Naboovian national anthem, which in this instance sounded like a baby Gungan hollering for its mother.

Captain Panaka would probably have had three heart attacks by now, Sabé thought, as she applauded the band, whose members bowed with elaborate and totally made-up flourishes. One of them requested her contact number, but was quickly escorted away.

Dex, at her request, obligingly redistributed her plates of food to the other customers in the bar (who were all more or less appreciative), and then – with her permission – brought out various pieces of broken machinery for her to take a look at.

It was a much more agreeable way to spend the time, Sabé thought as she tinkered with a mechanical food processor, egg beater, and juice maker. The last two she returned to working order in no time, though the first took a little longer as one of its wires had been crushed and melted where it sat right up against the oven.

* * *

And it was in that position – her table strewn with various kitchen gadgets and mechanical devices – that Obi-Wan Kenobi found Sabé, as he came into Dexter's Diner for his bi-weekly information scouting trip.

Earlier the day before, while he listened to the young Queen Amidala address the senate in their rousing – if somewhat misguided, he thought – vote of no confidence against the standing Chancellor, he became aware of something not-quite-right.

The queen was standing very far away from him, to be sure. She looked very much the same, her voice still that same low tone, but something was – off. Almost imperceptible in the distance, but he realized that the force signature of the queen today was not the same as the one he had encountered on the ship.

He considered for a few second the possibility of sleep deprivation and his current spat with Qui-Gon having gotten in the way of his thinking mind, before he remembered something Anakin had said, while they were on the ship.

_You look a lot like Padmé_.

And now, knowing full well that their client, the Queen Amidala of Naboo, would be embroiled in senate meetings for the whole of the day, he also found her happily chatting away with Dexter at the Diner.

She certainly did look a lot like the Queen.

"Obi-Wan," Dexter said, moving toward him, in that way of blasting that he took for a normal speaking voice.

"Good god, Dex," he said, "do you have any idea who she is?"

"A good friend of yours, from Naboo!" the owner boomed – indeed, Obi-Wan had long known that as long as Dex spoke at an alarmingly loud voice, no one heeded what he said. It was only when he quieted down that others in the diner would become interested.

"Yes, and what is she doing here?"

"The Corellian recommended it to her," Dexter laughed, "and she fixed Maureen! And now she is fixing all of my things that have been broken, some of them for going on ten years."

Obi-Wan sighed. His sighs of long-suffering have sounded more like Qui-Gon's of late. It was time for damage control, before anyone watching closely on the holovids noticed the girl's strange resemblance to the Naboovian monarch, and how her outfit matched those of the Handmaidens.

"Do you have anything for me this week, Dex?" he said.

Dex responded by shaking his hand vigorously. A chip passed between them, unnoticed.

"Only our best Jawa Juice, Obi-Wan. Do you want to sit down by your friend?"

"I think that would be the best idea," Obi-Wan said, grimacing.

Her eyes grew huge as he approached, the cup of steaming Jawa Juice in his hand. Obi-Wan would have thought it funnier had the idea not occurred to him that he had absolutely no idea who _she_ was.

He sat down. Her hands stilled on the black-crusted egg beater, then stilled, put under the table.

She looked at him, then at the drink in his hand.

"I was told to avoid the Jawa Juice, myself."

"Who are you?"

She winced, but Obi-Wan wasn't in the mood to oblige with niceties. Then she began tinkering with the juice maker, unscrewing the bottom and glancing inside with a hesitant look. Then she sighed, and her eyes came back to his – hazel, flecked with a good deal of green, now the brown of Queen Amidala's eyes as they looked in the hologram of her coronation, he realized.

"I'm the Decoy, Jedi Kenobi. I thought that should have been obvious."

"And the real Queen?"

She gave him an expectant look.

"Padmé, of course," Obi-Wan heaved a sigh, "so my master took the Queen of Naboo into a scrapping town in Hutt-controlled territory. No doubt he will find this vastly amusing, in time."

"She would have it no other way," the girl replied, glancing down again.

"And why are you here, instead of with the Naboovian party at 500 Republica?"

She related to him Panaka's plans for her this afternoon, keeping her eyes fixed on Dexter's long-damaged kitchenware. Obi-Wan found himself angry, perhaps at being duped so easily, and perhaps because she was admitting all this so easily – she who would just as easily lie. And he had called her a friend!

Alarmed by the rate that his irritation was running away from him, Obi-Wan barely managed to swallow his next, no doubt snappish comment before he reestablished his grasp on the force, to release this unreasoning anger.

She had only done her duty, he thought. But there was still the feeling of betrayal under it. He would have to look more closely at that, later. Yet as the years of practice sank in, his anger and irritation were gone and Obi-Wan merely felt the curiosity that she had always evoked rise in him, and with it that half-remembered affection and camaraderie that was the work of another planet, under starlight, and between cups of hot tea.

"Are you finding Dexter's Diner to your liking?"

She glanced up. The Queen's mask, long ago slipping in his presence, was nonexistent here, where she was not Queen- had never been Queen. Obi-Wan read easily in that less inscrutable look a hesitancy, after his initial curtness.

"I like it," she said. And seeing that she had surprised him, the smile came back, playing on the corners of her mouth, "it seems it could double as a home, for those who come here."

Obi-Wan lifted an eyebrow, "what Dexter lacks in fineness and abilities in cooking, he certainly makes up for in homeliness."

An easier smile from her, this time.

"And information?" she asked, but it was not a question. She glanced at his hands, closed on the table.

A surprise, again. He couldn't help but feel outclassed again this afternoon, "You saw that?"

"Dexter thought I was an informant for you when I walked in," she said, causing Obi-Wan to wonder with some alarm how many other moderately respectable strangers Dexter had addressed with the same question, "But I didn't see it. I can hear it."

Obi-Wan's whole attention was engaged now, "hear – it?"

"The chip. The little pocket under the wrist on your left hand," she said, and then saw his expression, "oh, you mean – the hearing part."

She began to tinker adroitly with the juicer again, and while Obi-Wan attempted to word his next questions in a more intelligent way than repeating what she said with a voice of incredulity, he heard behind him looming thunder that signaled Dexter's footsteps. The Owner parked himself by their table, and presented Obi-Wan with a very wide smile, and an extra –large mug of Jawa Juice.

"Now, Young Kenobi – I was going to put these on your regular credit log – but seeing how you're friend with Young Miss here, who's done Maureen such a great favor, drinks are on me this afternoon, eh?"

He clapped Obi-Wan on the back. It took all his training not to wince. Across the table the girl watched him with an expression of sympathy.

"Appreciate it, Dexter," Obi-Wan eyed his drink with less than perfect enthusiasm.

"Anything for one of our best customers," Dexter gave him another comradely thump on the shoulder, quite possibly compressing the column of his spine to extensive internal hemorrhaging, and grinned toothily, "Young Miss – what is your name, Young Miss?"

She smiled at the giant, and said, "my name is Sabé."

Obi-Wan realized that he had not known her name until now. Because he felt he knew her so well, it did not occur to him to ask. The he thought, _Sabé._What a lovely name..

Across from him, "Young Sabé" refused another offer of ardees, with uttermost politeness, citing her current preoccupation with Dexter's kitchen appliances.

"Yes, thank you!" Dexter thundered, and then decided apparently to push his luck, "if you do have time, Young Sabé, one of the burners in the back kitchen has been having some trouble –"

Obi-Wan glanced at his watch, "Maybe next time, Dexter? Miss Sabé and I have matters of great importance to discuss."

"Oh?" the saucer-plate eyes grew round, "I thought she was an informant, but she herself said she wasn't. Young Kenobi, always talked to the canny ones. Thank you then, Miss. It is good to see you, Young Kenobi."

And he ambled off, each step like the pounding of some great prehistoric beast.

"Matters of great importance?" the girl – Sabé said, eyebrows rising.

"You do not want to see the insides of Dexter's kitchen, front burner or back, I assure you," Obi-Wan said, "this is for your benefit, really."

"My thanks," she said, amused, "I must ask how you can tolerate drinking that…stuff."

He looked at the bits of hide floating about in his cup of ardees, but his eyes were mischievous.

"I am a Jedi, aren't I?"

She looked at him straight on, then dropped her gaze.

"Yes, yes you are. But I am not the Queen of Naboo."

A little silence fell, during which all the gaps in his knowledge where she was concerned flashed – as it were- before Obi-Wan's eyes, and he could not seem to come up with a single question. In the end it was she who spoke up.

"Jedi Kenobi," she said, having stilled her hands, but her voice was hesitant, for the words, "For what little it is worth, I am sorry for having made you believe I was not who I am."

Compassion came to his rescue, and he cut her off, "This is not an apology that you have to make. Instead, shall we begin again, Sabé?" he extended a hand.

"We shall, Obi-Wan," she replied, taking it.


	11. Still and Still Moving

A/N: Obi-Wan discovers a new feeling. ;)

* * *

**Chapter Ten: Still and Still Moving**

_We must be still and still moving_

_Into another intensity_

_For a further union, a deeper communion_

_Through the dark cold and the empty desolation..._

_-_T.S. Eliot "East Coker"

Sabé arrived back at her quarters at the 500 Republica with a singing lightness in her veins, which – as it turned out – was completely opposite of the atmosphere therein. While the other handmaidens zoomed to and fro packing supplies, Captain Panaka came up to Sabé and questioned her about her training – no suspicions even though Sabé knew her clothes smelled of the frying oil and her hands, hidden behind her back, were covered with the residues of grease. Panaka must have been very distracted.

"Well, I hope Duel has taught you well," Panaka huffed, and Sabé had the impression that he trod on many of his words, stuffed them back inside before they found a way out, "We are going back to Naboo, on the Queen's orders. There's nothing left to be done here."

Looking at his face, Sabé forbade herself from asking questions, but merely nodded. There would be plenty of time to drag out the details in the evening.

Panaka gazed back at her, "You'll need your blasters ready," he said, "and a suit of blaster armor; wear it next to the skin. It'll be hot and uncomfortable but I'm happier with you in it."

"Yes, Captain," Sabé said.

He made a motion to go, then turned back to her again, his dark eyes holding hers steady, "I don't know what it would look like back home, when we get there."

"We will manage," Sabé said, "we have Padmé with us."

"Shiraya protect us," said Panaka, "that girl will get us all killed, herself included."

"Keep faith, Captain. It'll turn out all right."

He raised an eyebrow, "I'd be much happier if it was Saché telling me that."

Sabé smiled at him.

"Having a decoy was one of my more creative ideas, Sabé," Captain Panaka said, looking suddenly more than his forty years, "and as the Corellian said, I am not known for my spontaneity. Normalcy is much safer. Always safer."

"Sir?"

"Don't go proving me right by getting yourself hurt, do you hear? Duck if they shoot at you. First pull Padmé down with you. Then shoot back."

"I will try make you proud, captain," Sabé said.

Until then she had not thought Panaka capable of fatigue, of uncertainty, and it was painful to think him mired in self-doubt. She was surprised by this vulnerability that seemed at once to give this two-dimensional, predictable, even _boring_man a sudden and complete reality. At that moment she wanted to make him take back that tired look and be restored to his usual, unflappable self.

"Really Captain, even Dengar Duel was impressed with me."

He clapped her lightly on the shoulder, and left.

* * *

After some hours on the ship, when the wildness and the force of Padmé's mind battered excessively on Sabé's ears, she had put on ear plugs to listen to the holonet, hoping that using her hearing in its normal capacity would disable that sensitivity to the imperceptible. Then Padmé surfaced from her deliberation, and it felt as if a great rumbling noise in the background had gone silent, leaving one's ears ringing oddly in its wake.

They had no choice but to go for help from the Gungans, Padmé said. The pilot was made aware of their destination. Going into Gungan territory also meant that Sabé would, once again, assume the Queen's battle regalia and walk high-headed through hostile swamps draped in scarlet and black.

Sabé expected fear, but as once before when she faced Nute Gunray in the Palace and saw the arrogance slicked like a layer of oil over his central greed, she still did not feel fear, only a sense of change, as of the ground falling out a little from under her. For what evil there was in Gunray was understandable, it could be catalogued, like creatures in Obi-Wan's collections. It could be rendered unfearful.

Avoiding sleep again, Sabé went to her usual retreat. The engine room, dimly lit by the sensor lights, was a warm cocoon of sound and structure. There was a safety in it, in the middle of wires and pillars, each of which had its own purpose, its own function, its role. Everything fit here, Sabé thought; nothing wasted.

Too bad that the same could not be said of life.

She had not closed her eyes for long in meditation when the noise, as of a deep purring, reached her. For a long, uncertain moment she was at a loss, having never heard any machine make that particular sound, and was looking around to see if this could be a precursor to their radiator boards failing when the tusk cat appeared from behind the next, unlit door.

Sabé froze.

Full-sized Naboovian tusk cats were roughly the size of landspeeders, so she reckoned that the newcomer, who stood a little shorter than her where she sat and was no longer than she was tall must be a very young one of its species. It had seen her, and cautiously padded up to her. There was a raised welt in the upper corner of its eye, red on fur the color of the Tatooine desert at sunset. The great tusks that defined the species were still somewhat recognizable as incisors on this creature, and were only as long as Sabé's index finger, but already they shone in the light of the engine room.

The tusk cat studiously avoided touching Sabé where she sat still as if she were a part of the floor, but arched its back and bent its head to stare into her face with that fixity and stillness of purpose that only wild creatures seem to possess. Its eyes were a warm brown-gold, large and liquid, the shape of almonds curving up in the corners. Suddenly Sabé was reminded of Saché, who looked at her with the same archness. Despite the feeling that her heart had stopped beating, Sabé smiled.

The great cat tossed its head as Sabé's breath parted the small hairs on its forelocks, and then abruptly bent its shapely, delicate head to her hand and nosed her palm affectionately. Its grace was feline, but the affection was canine. Sabé followed the cat's lead and stroked its ears, under its chin, and then was directed to scratch - vigorously - behind its shoulder blades. The tusk cat purred, making every hair on Sabé's arms stand on end, as if they sensed danger in their own right.

"I think she likes you," said someone, and the tusk cat growled as Sabé's hand stilled in her short, dusky fur. The tall figure of Qui-Gon Jinn stepped out from behind the low-ceilinged doorway - he had to duck - and came to stand before Sabé. He cocked his head to the side and was watching with a smile as Sabé scratched behind the cat's ears again.

"Did you... bring her onboard, Master Jinn?" Sabé asked.

He grinned, nodding, "I did."

"Where in Shiraya's name did you find her - on Coruscant?"

"Indeed," said Jinn, propping a shoulder languidly on the side of the control panel, utterly relaxed, as if he hadn't noticed that he was in the room with Naboo's fiercest hunter.

His eyes were green, but toward the dark iris they turned a steely gray. Jinn was watching the purring cat with undisguised affection. At the corners of his eyes laughter lines radiated out, as children might draw lines of light coming from the sun.

Sabé was struck by how unreserved Obi-Wan's master was. Even the way he walked, the way he occupied space, had a supple but relaxed quality to it. Where Obi-Wan was controlled, contained, polished, his master was like another great cat, lounging with fluid grace. Jinn did not seem the type of man who found the greater part of wisdom in restraint. There was an exuberance about him, a spontaneity, that overflowed into his immediate vicinity even when he was just standing there, smiling at a girl petting a cat.

Sabé liked him immediately. His ordinary openness allowed others to leave off their gestures and their affectations, and speak in honest.

"And who might you be?" Asked Qui-Gon Jinn, turning his eyes now to Sabé.

But before she could speak, he smiled again, with great delight.

"Oh, I see. You're the ghost, are you not?" He laughed, "Our own little ghost in the machine. You who are Queen and yet not Queen; the good Captain Panaka's secret."

"How did you know?" Sabé asked.

But Jinn merely smiled, then inclined his head toward the still-purring tusk cat, who had decided Sabé's lap was a good place as any to rest her large, squarish head, and moved only every so often so Sabé could get at the other ear, or under her chin.

"I thought," Jinn said, "that Chancellor Valorum wouldn't do justice to a soon-to-be full-grown Naboovian tusk cat. He certainly needs nothing other than his new-found influence to impress his fellows. And his menagerie on Coruscant could do with one fewer inmate."

He turned his eagle's eyes to Sabé, this time with a muted hint of fire, "she was getting too large, too unwieldy for the assistants that kept his zoo. And I couldn't bear to see a beauty like her trammeled and beaten."

Jinn took a step closer, crouched down beside the tusk cat and reached out with a steady hand to stroke her belly. The cat narrowed hers eyes to slits, and growled with an undercurrent of warning in the back of its throat. Jinn gently removed his hand, and sat back.

"You see, she only tolerates me because she knows I mean her no harm. But these creatures are proud. Some might domesticate them and turn them into beasts of burden, but they remember that they had carried the Kings and Queens of Naboo upon their backs, once upon a time. So they do not yield their favor to any riff-raff from space that might come along."

His eyes twinkled.

Sabé laughed, "You mean that the cat, too, has mistaken me for a queen of Naboo?"

Jinn looked at her closely, affectionately, as if they had known each other for a long time. Then he smiled that same smile, generous and yet enigmatic.

"I think she knows what she sees, little ghost."

He stood with the smooth and energetic movement of a man many years his junior, and pointed to the antechamber he emerged from.

"I've made up a sort of cot for her in there," he said, "and it would be best for us to let her out when we disembark, on the edge of Gungan territory, or she will be hungrier than is comfortable."

"I can program the door to open when we land," Sabé said, "some of the droid ports can be rearranged and she will be able to get out."

"Very well," Jinn said, "then as for you, little ghost, I did not know you were even here. Likewise, the good Captain does not need to know that a tusk cat had even set foot on this ship."

"Very well, Master Jinn," said Sabé.

He nodded. "Force be with you, little ghost."

* * *

When the Queen stepped out of the starship with Padmé and the other handmaidens in tow, it was to be greeted by the warm, dewy air of the Naboo forests. Her small company was last to exit, and the two Jedi who stood to follow were watching her closely as she descended. The queen's face never gave itself to much expression, but she nodded briefly at Qui-Gon, who after disembarking had sensed the brief shape of some predator in the dense, soupy fog that made up the forest floor, inclined his head in her direction with a small smile. Even in times of war, or rather, especially in times of war, when the large motions of history were guided to destruction, to death, did these small favors of fortune shine so much the brighter.

Whoever enjoyed hiking through the foggy and dense undergrowth of the great forests of Naboo, thought Sabé, never had to do it with a ten-pound hairpiece. It had been sometime since she wore it last, as Padmé had been in her own seat at the Senate and even most of today, but the weight of it was giving her a headache.

There were many things that Sabé felt herself unequal to, living in the world, and forcing a Gungan peace treaty was one of them. She had little idea about the mechanics of it, the give and take of interest, the shifts of power and prestige that so closely underscored the negotiations. More than anything she wished that she had a delicate ear and a tongue of silver that was required for these things, as Obi-Wan did. There was a sick feeling in her stomach, a fear of failure she had rarely felt before in her role as Decoy. She told Padmé about her misgivings while they were still on ship.

"I know," Padmé said, and Sabé felt as if she could hear the thoughts howling across the young Queen's mind yet again, "I know this is not what you signed up for. And the Jedi are strictly forbidden from assisting us in these matters, even if they happen to agree with us."

Then she grinned, and despite the tension in the room it cut across like a bright ray in the gloom. It reminded Sabé of Qui-Gon, actually.

"Don't you worry," said Queen Amidala, "if you do what you can, I'm sure we'll think of something."

And so when Padmé cut before Sabé and stepped fearlessly up to face Boss Nass, speaking clearly in her voice of her true identity, of truce and friendship, Sabé was content to watch. The relief was monumental, like being restored to her own skin.

Even though she might remain hopeless at politics, she sensed Padmé's joy in it, her swift command of its language, her deftness in its many meanings. For a moment it was as if she stood inside Padmé's mind, and found that the gale winds that swept there were not so unlike the great, shifting dunes of her own imagination.

* * *

Padmé, Boss Nass, the Jedi and Captain Panaka were all in deep discussion, circled tightly on the edge of a clearing. Rabé had set up a temporary clinic for any one, human or Gungan, needing medical attention and for once Eirtaé stayed to help her. Sabé had little stomach for wounds and for blood. Bandages and the smell of antiseptic had always called up memories of those days in the hospital, filled to overflowing, with the sound of coughing and retching all around her.

Her own illness had been a world of dreams. Like the few survivors who emerged from the brain fever, Sabé had lost much of her past, even her own name. Perhaps it was not so far off the mark that Qui-Gon Jinn had called her a ghost. She did not remember any details of her life before her seventh birthday. Her parents could have been anyone. The vague love she felt, thinking of them now, could merely be a feeling for ghosts. But Sabé could not help but believe that she had been loved, in her youth, for there were times when she had found a quiet tenderness and generosity in her own heart that would no have been possible otherwise. The marks of love, which could not be seen or felt, still could not be erased by illness.

Sabé left Rabé and Eirtaé to their business, and went to search for something that she could do. She had to, on more than a few occasions, step around to avoid the great lumbering kaadu that were being herded across the floor of the swamp to the shouted commands of the foot soldiers.

Following the buzzing, crackling sound of electricity Sabé found what looked like the engineering corps of the Gungan army. There were only about ten of them, and by their looks, all male. She approached the one who was working on one of the enormous shield generators, and was studiously ignored for a minute straight before her third, growingly irate "excuse me" brought him to take of his goggles and fix his bright amber eyes at her.

Gungans were, to Sabé, only theoretical beings before now. The part of the world in which she lived was nowhere near theed or the great swamps in Southern Naboo. But from what she had seen of Jar Jar Binks she had expected that Gungans would be friendly; overly loquacious at times, too. But they were fierce creatures, and warlike: Boss Nass with his great size, and now this Gungan who was glowering at her was also a great deal larger (wider) thank Jar Jar binks and wore less good humor on his face.

"What," the Gungan said, "what doin yousa wanna?"

"I wanted to help," said Sabé, trying to channel Padmé when she stood up to Boss Nass earlier this afternoon, "I've some experience with machines and wanted to see if you needed an extra hand."

"Yousa wanna help?" The look was quite clearly one of deep skepticism. The Gungan looked her over, from head to toe, then smirked, "yousa gonna mess up nice clothes, girl, yousa help."

There were snorts of laughter from his compatriots, and while they laughed Sabé put two fingers on his great machine and hummed a few low notes under her breath. Men! She thought, universally the same! And recalled belatedly that had been one of Sister Mabela's perennial sayings.

When they were done joking, Sabé said, "I see you're trying to increase generator power to last in case of prolonged combat. But have you tried this?"

Five incredulous minutes later, they got her an extra apron, and Sabé was happily working away, up to her elbows (sleeves rolled of course) in the main shield generator.

* * *

It was getting near full dark when Obi-Wan finished discussing the plans with Qui-Gon, the true Queen of Naboo, and the Gungans. Captain Panaka had already set off with a small contingent of his men on landspeeders to survey the enemy's firepower and the camps under cover of night. They had arranged a at dawn.

When Padmé had stepped forward and revealed herself as the true queen, Obi-Wan looked over at his master to gauge his reaction, a little smug that he had known all along. But the look that he caught from Qui-Gon was one of equal appraisal. So his master had known, as well. And here was Obi-Wan, wanting again to one-up the old man. It was no easy thing, Obi-Wan reflected ruefully.

Looking at Padmé, now, after, he was still startled by her uncanny resemblance to Sabé. It was as if nature, by two entirely different paths, had arrived at the same conclusion of that which was good. But with bare faces exposed, Obi-Wan saw the differences, which though small, spoke of a world of difference inside.

For Sabé to smile, she had to be drawn out, patiently, like a creature from the woods. Whereas Padmé would smile and laugh as one certain of her footing, forthright and pealing.

Now, with the plans drawn, Qui-Gon suggested that Obi-Wan might go and look over the shield generators, which figured largely in the Gungan's defense.

"They're going to be the diversion," Qui-Gon said, "there is no call for them to lose more men than they will already."

In the falling twilight campfires appeared one by one, like incandescent lights winking in and out behind the dense foliage, peering through the great covering firs of the forest floor. The Gungans gathered around and there was talk, and a great deal of laughter and horseplay went on, in anticipation of the battle. Obi-Wan saw the queen and her handmaidens around a large fire in a semicircle. The other half of the circle was completed by the Gungans, with Boss Nass seated firm like a great tree stump in the middle. Some rather elaborate preparation of fish was being served by Nass, who apparently took the role of host seriously and wanted something to impress the Naboovians with. But the figure most familiar to Obi-Wan was missing.

He did not even need to pick up the trail of her force signature, merely followed the sound of the buzzing electric welder as a bee follows the scent of distant flowers on the air, and found Sabé a distance away, in a clearing. She was almost submerged in a force field generator, working hard at something in its underbelly. She held a small, sleek flashlight between her teeth. Her Queen's outfit was obscured by a comically large work apron that covered her almost to her toes.

A feeling rose in him, unfurling slowly as smoke on a windless day, as he watched her small, deft hands move expertly over the large machine, her bare face taut in an expression of utter concentration. The feeling was so novel that he could not name it, nor place another time when he felt that similar ache. It was as if some sleeping part of his being, in repose since the moment of his birth and quiescent throughout all his years of training, had been called awake.

The most familiar component of Obi-Wan's emotional repertoire - the feeling that most often rose out of that gray luminescent soup that was his normal state - was the fierce, crystalline joy when on missions everything became clear, and he knew what it was he had to do. Besides that, there was frustration, as when things went awry from their normal course, such as this debacle with Anakin's training and Qui-Gon's stubbornness.

This ache, however, somewhere near the region of his heart, this was strange. Why indeed should the sight of Sabé, Decoy to the Queen of Naboo, make him feel as if someone had pressed hard on an old bruise somewhere in the middle of his chest? Why did his lungs feel at once empty, and yet too full?

Obi-Wan saw that a few of the Gungan engineers had gathered behind Sabé to watch her work, as he did. Some of them were already slurping noisily at their evening meal. He went over to the largest of them - girth was usually a good marker of senority and experience, and the Gungans were no exception - and asked about their progress.

"Desa equipment is old," huffed the Gungan, "but it ganna getin da job done."

Then he nodded in Sabé's direction, "da human girl know her machines."

Then he went back to work, brushing his ear flaps over his shoulder. Obi-Wan walked to Sabé, calling out a greeting. She paused and turned to him, taking hold of her flashlight. Even in the dark he saw here eyes were dazed, as of a dreamer interrupted from her journey in the alpine heights of Almirrra, or of a diver surfacing from deep waters. Then her eyes cleared and she saw him again, and at her smile that same ache came again to him, so familiar and yet unknown.

"Obi-Wan," she said. There was a small smudge of oil on her cheek. She had secured her voluminous sleeves at her elbows and her hands were stained with the black oil of machines, and also there was a bluish substance on it that Obi-Wan did not recognize.

"Sabé," he said, "what have you found?"

"Genle there has kept all of these in good working order," she replied, indicating the large Gungan that Obi-Wan had been speaking with, "and they are very powerful. The substance that's used to fuel these machines is like nothing I've seen."

She wiped her hands on her apron and looked up with consternation at the deepening blue of the sky and then back at Obi-Wan.

"If there was any weakness to it, it's that the four shield generators all depend on one another - they need the mutually resonating field in order to be effective."

"So if one is taken down, the whole system fails?"

"In a way, yes," Sabé replied, "the remaining three might still be functional but the shield itself will be gone, utterly dissipated."

"So as long as they fire from outside the shield, everyone stays safe," said Obi-Wan, watching the way Sabé's hands rested on the machine affectionately.

"Yes, they will work against all energy blast weapons and the like. But soldiers will be able to come through."

"They will send droids," said Obi-Wan.

"Yes, they will, won't they," said Sabé, "those cheaters. Bending technology to fit their brutish ends. Buying droids by the hundreds to go against these poorly armed Gungans. It's not fair at all. How many droids are worth a mans' life?"

The evening had grown colder and she shivered. Obi-Wan heard her stomach growl, and smiling offered his hand to help her up. He did not know what it meant that he should marvel at the strong grip of her small hands, and how well they fit inside his own.

They were walking back across the encampment when Sabé saw that the clouds had cleared, and the sky was a vast lake scattered with bits of moonlight.

Obi-Wan, walking at her side, was quiet, lost in thought, judging by the small notch that carved itself in between his brows when he was thinking. But he stopped when she did and gazed up with her.

"Where is Coruscant?" Sabé asked.

She felt him smile, and he pointed to a bright light above the tree cover far to their left, "that light there is Coruscant prime, the planet's sun. Sometimes when the sky is dark enough you can see the whole great metal bulk of the planet itself, glinting like an afterthought in orbit."

"When I left the abbey," Sabé said, "I told Sister Mabela that I would return after this was all over."

She looked out into the distance where Couruscant Prime hung amidst the sky, glowing with the same indifferent, dazzling glimmer as all other stars that filled the horizon.

"I remember that she looked at me," Sabé continued, "not skeptical, not approving, just a waiting look. Obi-Wan I've been to the planet that circles that star. Isn't that wonderful?"

"And Tatooine," he said.

"How can I forget?" She said,"the binary sunset. And the white desert spider. You know, before all this I had looked at the sky and only thought, here I am, under the spinning world, the roving clouds, the wandering moon, here I am. But now there is such possibility in every speck, every dust mote, every ray of starlight. I want to know what is out there, Obi-Wan. I want to see worlds made under the light of a different sun."

Obi-Wan looked at her eyes, bright with the light of stars and fires, "why then did you go to the abbey?"

"I wanted - " Sabé began, and caught herself, "after the hospital it was the orphanage, this one and then that one when they consolidated all the children left behind by the virus. There weren't many of us, but enough, and everywhere, we were being moved. I wanted a place where I could be still. I wanted to plant my feet upon solid ground."

"And now," she said, "now I want the air."

Even in the dark he could see the blush spreading over her cheeks.

"Talking nonsense," Sabé muttered, as if to herself, and set out, leaving him behind.

Obi-Wan followed after, a little behind as not to fluster her.

Not nonsense, he thought, remembering how he had felt, heartsick and dejected, when he thought he was assigned to the Agricorps, that his dream of becoming a Jedi knight were gone forever. Such dreams he had then, in the quiet mornings, in his cot. His dreams had stretched out, reached all across the galaxy, into the deepest recesses of the cosmos. He wanted to be everywhere. The dissolution of that dream had been painful as amputation, to have the great limbs of his wonder cut down to size, to be left with the uninspired corners of various star systems. It felt to him like the loss of hearing, or of sight; a loss of some unrecorded organic sense.

Now, having seen the wonders of other worlds, he also saw greed, malice, and great apathy hung in the black between the stars. Now on the eves before battles or in the middle of being hurtled from one conflict to another, there were nights when Obi-Wan could not sleep for fear that the world around him might disappear, that the universe which clamored around him might all fall silent, and the ground give way under him. In the dissolving dark it did not seem so impossible.

Hadn't the poet said, long in ago in a faraway world, that we must be still and still moving?

He knew her mind, Obi-Wan thought. In this moment he knew her as he knew himself.


	12. All These Blasphemies

A/N: Some questions get answered again. And Qui-Gon gets some face-time. Any drum references have their origins in Doctor Who. As always please read and review!

* * *

**Chapter 11: All these Blasphemies to be True**

_Already the knowing animals are aware _

_that we are not really at home_

_In our interpreted world._

-Rilke, First Elegy

Nearly everyone retired early, but Sabé could not sleep again. Every time she drifted off she woke to a sound like the distant drumbeat, but when she bent her ear to its source, nothing came, only the sizzling crackle of fires, the mute winking of stars. The third time she woke it was with a pounding heart, as if she had been called. Wakefulness seized her. She had not rested since the morning of that day long ago when she had gone shooting with Dengar Duel, when for some hours she had been holed up in Dexter's Diner, fixing broken eggbeaters, speaking with Obi-Wan.

Sabé went to sit by the fire, banked but still burning high. Every whisper of wind overturned a sparking ember. The dark, which took from things their shape and solidity, took from Sabé her intense embarrassment. For it was as if she could not, did not, have control over what she said into Obi-Wan's waiting silences, and instead of conversation she had surfaced with words and feelings that she had hardly dared acknowledge to herself. But there it was; no mind tricks, no prompting, only that brilliant edge of him, his balance giving her back that center from which truth emerges.

So she would wait a few days, but Sabé knew in her heart the letter she must send back to the abbey, back to the papery hands of Sister Mabela. Sabé did not know where she would go, after the Captain had no more use of her, but she suspected that something would turn up. She was no longer without friends in the Galaxy.

The figure had been sitting so still on the opposite side of the fire, it was only when he opened his eyes that Sabé saw Qui-Gon Jinn there, in meditation pose at the edge of the flames.

"You should sleep," he said to her.

"Ghosts do not sleep, Master Jinn," Sabé replied. The night was turning chill and she gathered the blankets more tightly around her.

"Do ghosts have names," he said, "as Jedi do?"

"I am Sabé."

"Ah," Jinn said. He unfolded his limbs from his meditation pose, and rubbed absently on his right knee. "What disturbs your sleep, Handmaiden Sabé?"

"I don't know, Master Jinn," she said, "I thought heard something."

A groan from somewhere near Jinn made him look down at the figure, wrapped in blankets, huddled in on itself. It was shivering violently,

"Is that –"

"Obi-Wan?" Jinn said, "Yes. He's having a nightmare, as some might call it."

"What do you mean? It's not a nightmare?" Sabé whispered, watching the huddled shape flinch, gasping as if in pain. She wanted to reach out, shake him awake, and speak to him until the fit passed. But Qui-Gon Jinn did not move.

"The force speaks to Obi-Wan most directly when he cannot hope to close his ears," Jinn said, "In waking he seeks control, restraint, and self-mastery. Even in meditation there is still a sliver of that desire to control left in him, and so the force speaks but quietly, like a shy creature that waits at the edge of the clearing, just shy of the light. It waits until he is asleep, and then it roars in his ears like sand storm off of Tatooine. Only when he is defenseless does it show him the hidden tremors of futures that could be. So yes, it is a nightmare. One he has to bear before we do, and, if we are fortunate, one that he has to bear only in his dreams and not in waking."

"He must have woken me," Sabé said.

At this, Qui-Gon smiled.

"No," he said, "no, handmaiden Sabé. I heard what it was you heard, and it is what you heard in your mind that woke you."

"What do you mean, Master Jinn? You speak riddles."

"The beating drum," he said, "you can hear it, can't you? At the edges of of your mind, pulling, tugging. Still your mind. Let it dissolve into the air. Can you hear it?"

Sabé closed her eyes, and there it was.

"Yes," she said, "it is the red lightsaber."

"It's a disturbance in the force," said Jinn.

"The man you were fighting in the desert."

"Oh, I don't know how much man there is left in him," Jinn said, "say Sith lord, rather. The first two times you woke I sensed him as well, at the periphery, faint but unmistakable like the tang of burnt things in the air. What woke you finally was I, calling to you through the force."

"That's impossible," Sabé said, "I've already told Obi-Wan. I am no force-sensitive."

"Oh, I think you have been a decoy long enough, little ghost," he said, "there is no shame in it; there's no need to deny it."

"Master Qui-Gon," said Sabé, exasperated, "Naboo is a core planet. I was tested when I was born."

"Ah yes, and there is the mystery," Jinn said, "can you imagine with me? You will have to bear with an old man's fancy, I'm afraid. Is it not possible that the girl who survived a virus that took her whole village, might not have something special about her, something other than pure luck?"

He turned again to stare into the fire.

"At the Jedi Temple, on the core planet of Coruscant, the center of every cilivilization, we have the best medicine in the world. I might come in at the edge of death and be healed. But we have almost nothing of the sort of medicine that treats the chronic diseases that afflict the affluent and poor alike, in their old age.

"We Jedi do not live long because we die in battle, because our enemies overpower us. Yet if we were to live, with all these midichlorians weaving that rhythm of life inside us, we would age and age and age, but in our souls, and not in our faces, not unless there is great sorrow. If we were good enough, we might live on and on, come even to look like Master Yoda, and one day fade like dust into the sunbeam.

"This is because the midichlorians repair us, restore us as no medicine can, as only the giver of life itself can. So imagine our young girl, there on the verge of death with the virus raging through her body, the virus the claims your life, your memories; the virus that gets inside your brain.

"Then, by some unknown mechanism, a force rises in her. What healthy cells are left in her body begin to create, by the millions, these mysterious midichlorians, and they emerge, colonizing the infected tissue, remaking her mind essentially, rebuilding it with the very organisms that sustain our lives.

"And so she emerges unscathed from the unthinkable illness with ears that hear the secret dreams of machines, with a voice that, used in earnest, may convince the doubtful, with a face that not only _looks_like the face of another but _becomes_the other's face. And with no memories, for what was restored to her was a mind in its infancy, unused because it was brand new. And she still walks above the yawning dark, thinking herself perfectly ordinary.

"Not a force-sensitive," Jinn said, and chuckled, "they never thought to test you again, you and all those other children who lived. I would wager that all of you have some form of force-sensitivity."

"Oh," said Sabé.

"Yes, little ghost, you were brought back to us, by the force."

Besides Jinn, Obi-Wan gave another groan, still wrestling with the monster of his dreams.

"He is dear to you," Jinn said. It was not a question. But Sabé did not hear anger in it either.

"Yes, he is."

"Another thing we have in common, little ghost," he said, but his eyes were heavy, far away, "I can see your bond, growing by the day. I can sense it, in the force. Perhaps that is why you are here, because he needs you."

"Master Jinn? I don't understand."

"I am talking like an adherent of the unifying force, am I not?" he said, " let us leave the business of portents to Obi-Wan, then. I will only tell you that sometimes, to do what is right Obi-Wan will smother his own heart. It is what will make him great. Yet, one cannot live without his heart."

"Why are you telling me this, Master Jinn?"

"Just listen," he said, "listen to an old man. Obi-Wan will need you one day, to do what he needs to do, to live. A man will need his heart. But you will have to be patient."

Besides Jinn, Obi-Wan tossed as a man in fever, unable to emerge from the nightmare.

"Should we wake him, do you think?" said Sabé.

Jinn began a sentence, but thought better of it. Instead he stretched out a hand and beckoned her over to him.

"Indeed, we should," he said.

Sabé rose, unsure of her legs, feeling the night stir like a cool beast of the air. She stepped softly to where Obi-Wan lay , no longer aware that Qui-Gon looked a them both with a terrible gravity. She saw instead how the now-familiar notch had carved itself onto Obi-Wan's face, as if even in sleep some nagging thought bothered him. She saw the perspiration on his forehead, and in the hollows of his throat, glinting in the fire light.

And though she felt hesitant, unsure, bewildered even, Sabé laid her hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder, tensed and raised in sleep. Obi-Wan did not wake, only mumbled something in that hoarse, guttural voice of dreams and curled in upon himself. Nonetheless, Sabé moved her hand across his back in a gesture of reassurance.

It was as if she saw her hand from far away, and there was a feeling in her that this gesture was written into her very bones, that this was not novelty but rather a rite, something repeated over millennia, so deep it had sunk into the bones of her ancestors, and though they be dust their ghosts and the ghost of their hands moved with hers in an age-old gesture of comfort. It said that one was not alone, not even in the lands of sleep, from which he could see into death's domain.

And as if he had heard her on the other side of the dark door, Obi-Wan quieted. He gave two sighs, like a man whose pain was suddenly removed, and fell into that deathlike stillness of one in bright caverns that lay beyond dreaming.

Sabé stood, and walked around the fire, to sit down next to the Jedi master, who now seemed just as strange and wonderful, just as mysterious as before. But he had lost that terribleness, under the light of her Naboovian moon. She saw that he looked tired, but expectant, still alert, even into the watches of the night.

"I have never been able to take a nightmare from him," Jinn said, "sometimes he would not wake at all, but flail out at me with all the force of his training unleashed. I've had some impressive bruises from those encounters. Other nights he merely opens his eyes as if blind, and when he returns to that world of shadows and sand, he returns with no moment lost into nightmare."

Jinn looked at Sabé, "This is why he did not see that you were, like him, force-sensitive. Your signatures had harmonized, perhaps even from the moment that you first met, and so when he reached out he merely saw echoes of himself, the parts and traits which you had assumed. And over these short days he did not even notice that his own force signature had changed, as if a new wing had unfolded under his old, brilliant tone. And yours, handmaiden, yours has become like the running river that reflects all the dazzling blaze of the firebird soaring above. It was by this intimacy that you reached through his dreams.

"You can see by his eyes that he dreams on. But you took away his fear of it, his resistance to that which must come, which makes him look at me with all the anguish of loss in his unguarded moments. The emotion surprises even he, but that is because his waking mind does not believe what his dreaming eyes has seen. But now he is at peace. You have given him that. For that you have my thanks."

There was an unfamiliar fullness in Sabé's heart.

"But isn't it forbidden, Master Jinn? Even if he did – even if our force signatures were harmonized – isn't it wrong?"

"Perhaps," Jinn said, "the old masters forbade Jedi to have love, to have attachments based on love. They feared the ambition and hatred and dominating will that came with any passion, even this one. But they did not see the bridge under the fire, the bond beneath the passion. Or perhaps they feared that as much as they feared passion itself, feared to be altered, changed in their very essence.

"Know this, little ghost. Obi-Wan was made in the mold of these old masters. Even I gave them my whole-hearted trust, in my youth. But I believe that a man or a woman can only find the exquisite stillness of peace after great passion. I believe that the world wouldn't hold together, were it not for love.

"I believe it should not be in fear that we choose the light, nor should we choose it, in ignorance of the dark. Were we not born bathed already in both rivers of the force?"

Jinn looked back into the fire, "long have I considered these old blasphemies, argued with the old masters that reside in the chambers of my mind. But I do not have to read the book at any gate, or any temple, to know what is written in the book of my heart. And my heart has ever known all these blasphemies to be true."

The night fell quiet around them, punctuated by the rustle of trees and the muffled steps of Gungan soldiers, keeping watch. Sabé gathered her blanket around her again, not for warmth or comfort, but so that she could stand and move closer, and sit by where Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn sat before the fire.

"May I share this watch of the night with you, Master Jinn?"

"It would be my honor, little ghost," Jinn said, moving over, "and perhaps you will help me answer the question of where I shall dwell, when there is nowhere to remain."

That night Obi-Wan dreamed that he was in fever. But a hand took hold of his, cool but not cold, and passing across his face it eased the fever of the world.


	13. Empty Places of the World

A/N: In which people get shot.

* * *

**Chapter 12: Empty Places of the World**

_Every angel is terrifying._

_And so I hold myself back _

_and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing._

**-**Rilke, First Elegy

That night the stars were obscured. The bowl of the sky might have been a cave. As Sabé went through her final preparations before bed, Captain Panaka stopped on his final round. He looked at her from across the low burning fire.

"This would be the first time that I won't have your back, Handmaiden," he said.

"I will watch my own, then, Captain," Sabé replied and found she could still smile.

"Shiraya bless, and I'm asking you to watch yours and ours both," he looked at her, "Have I asked too much of you, young one?"

Sabé smiled, "it's one of your greatest virtues, Captain."

He swallowed, looking at his feet. "You know, I have a son about your age, in those camps. I have always been hard on him, as well."

"Perhaps when we get them out of those camps, you might introduce the two of us, Captain," Sabé said, "We can get together and compare notes on what a draconian leader you are. And since we are on the subject, is he handsome? Does he like a girl with very, very short hair who knows her machines?"

"Impudent girl," he said, but a smile came unwilling on his lips, "joking about frivolous things even on the eve of battle. But now that you ask, you may meet Lionel, that he may know one of the heroes of Naboo."

Panaka looked out into the darkening horizon, studiously avoiding her gaze, saying only, "I wish Saché were here. She would know what we can expect."

"I think she does know, Captain," Said Sabé, "I think that Saché knows we are coming to get them out."

* * *

The last fires had only gone out in the Gungan camp when Sabé sat up from her small pallet, night unslept. She sensed that charged air generated by wakeful people, moving purposely about. This was the second night in a row when she hadn't slept.

The Queen's lighter battle gear was assumed, the head dress attached firmly. A light layer of blaster-resistant armor went under everything. Sabé could now apply the smooth, stone-like mask of the queen with near automaticity, but she used a small electric lamp and a hand mirror, dotting the rouge upon her cheeks, and sweeping that single red lip with the scar of remembrance splitting its horizon. The air was balmy, even in the deep night, so she donned the lightest gloves and pulled her boots on tight.

Around the tent Rabé and Eirtaé woke, mumbled voices floating in that hushed morning air. They went to gather their weapons and their battle armor. All of them would wear the light suit on the skin, but Sabé knew that the higher settings of any blaster could penetrate it. It would reduce the power of a bolt, but if one were hit in the vitals there would be no return.

Sabé gathered her own weapons, two blasters in their respective hip holsters and another two guns she made especially from the Gungan plasma bolts, tucked in her boots. She had an idea how they might work, but there was time to make about ten bullets and it would be necessary to conserve them for the time of most need.

She went to Padmé, whose face was almost as white as her own in the enveloping dark, and checked over her weapons for her.

"All is well," Sabé said.

"Thank you, Sabé," Padmé said, standing there just a slight inch shorter. Sabé must have grown, these past days. The queen took Sabé's hand, and gripped it tight.

"It has been my honor," Sabé replied, "Your Royal Highness."

And she thought, if all went well today, then I would be the last decoy a monarch of Naboo will ever need. May it be so, she thought. May there be peace, a peace to rival the Long Peace of old, after today.

There was a little food passed around, but nobody had much appetite. Sabé thought she would be sick if she ate anything, now. And then they were hurrying under the spun web of stars, to the landspeeders that they would take to the Catacombs of Theed, then around the hidden recesses of the Verdugo falls that flowed on, with no regard to history, invasion, or war.

* * *

The fringes of the dawn found them running briskly through the labyrinthine maze of the palace grounds. The patrol droidekas were basic-function; they had none of the special adaptations to sense body heat or human sounds, merely the normal panoptic eye-field and sound amplifiers. They did not even have that intuitive sense of threat that comes to the aid to every sleepy sentry that shocks them into awareness, of enemies close by.

Captain Panaka lead the first small continent of men, along with Padmé, Rabé, Eirtaé, and the Jedi. Sabé followed behind, part of the second wave that would split off as soon as they breached the hangar, to draw fire as they moved through the palace grounds and take the attention off of the first group.

For the moment, they all kept out of sight and waited for the sun to come a little higher. Every ten minutes or so, the captain up ahead would give a little wave and they would run, with the rounded sounds of soft soled shoes on the familiar courtyard stone, up to the next set of concealments.

Sabé looked behind her to find that Haldron West stood there, pallid and glistening a little with perspiration on his upper lip, another member of the blue team. And though she could see his throat working and a muscle jumping in his jaw, there was only determination in his face, in the eyes. Sabé felt sudden affection toward him; she remembered when he had gallantly flown all of them out to the Autumn festival, for love of Rabé, and how taken aback he has seemed when she fixed his landspeeder. Two weeks, Sabé thought. How life might change in a mere space of two weeks. Years and years go by with nary an exciting thing between the pale, long afternoons, and then, a lifetime's worth of change. Like lightening flashes between the slow-gathered clouds.

Haldron had caught her look, and returned it with a nod, such as soldiers might give one another – though they were neither of them soldiers. From his eyes Sabé could see that he recognized her, and was surprised. And with what grace she could muster, she inclined her head in return.

It was full morning now. On the edge of her mind Sabé could hear, when she reached out, the distant droning of landspeeders approaching with the Naboovian underground resistance, outfitted with the long range blasters to disable the guard droids and allow them entrance into the starship hanger. There too, was that disconcerting flicker of that darkness she first sensed in the desert, grown ever stronger as she approached the palace. Like an irritable horse it pawed and stirred up strange feelings in her mind.

Yet more strongly than that red Sabér, Sabé could feel the tranquil sense of the blue and the green, standing quiet and motionless in long brown robes. Qui-Gon Jinn's deep resonant drumming signature beat on, despite the gray swathe of fatigue. As for Obi-Wan, his bright focus was a clear pool in the middle of a sea of sand. She had felt his presence grow steadily clearer in her mind since the morning before, irreversible. He was not afraid, only waiting, calmly waiting for the eye of the storm to pass overhead.

As if Obi-Wan felt her thought reach out to him, he turned his head and caught her eye, despite all that divided them.

"Be safe," said a voice in her mind, his voice, but it was swept away as Sabé felt the buzzing of the landspeeders on her physical ears, and Captain Panaka signaled peremptorily with two fingers, and the blasters whistled with explosions to herald that they had begun.

Blue and green lightsabers hummed into being and Sabé clicked the safety lock off her blaster and began to run, in the middle of a long line after Captain Panaka, who had gone out first of all. The droids were downed in the court yard, and Sabé took aim and fired at the ones rushing to provide back up. They ran past the twitching mechanical parts, and headed through the massive double doors of the hangar.

As Sabé waited for the rest of the group to come through, she slammed on the controls to close the doors and engage the manual lock. Beside her Haldron fired at the lines of droids marching toward them. His shot went off center, taking off a mechanical arm. Sabé raised her arm, realized that the emotion running through her was that of exhilaration, steadied her sight, and took down that droid, and then another.

"It's _you_who should stay behind me," she said to Haldron, as the door slammed into place with a bone-ratting clang, giving him the wink that the Corellian Dengar Duel had given her.

"I have to stay beside you, at least, or Panaka will never let me hear the end of it," Haldron said, grinning.

Then fire came at them from within the hanger, where blue and green blades danced almost indolently, with deadly precision against the red bolts. Sabé stood tall and aimed and went forward, droids falling around her and the starships whirling out from between the exchange of blasts, producing a range of high pitched shrieks rising through the air, filling her ears with their stinging whine.

Sabé almost didn't see the blast come from beside her. It hit the soldier before her, and even as he fell she steeled her heart and raised her weapon and was firing again. The sound of it was like hail pattering on her mind, hard and stinging.

The last droid crumbled in the room and Sabé realized they had taken the space. Captain Panaka called for everyone to regroup, and according to plan, Sabé and Haldron took a contingent to move through the levels of the castle, while Padmé and Captain Panaka were to use their ascension guns and take the faster route through the energy generation complex.

No sooner had Sabé exited the main hanger, she felt something had gone wrong. The drumming tattoo seemed closer than it had ever been before. She paused, whirled back. Every muscle in her body telling her to run as fast as she could, that there was something in that room they just left –

"We can't stay here," Haldron said from beside her.

"There's something in there," Sabé said, "something they didn't expect."

He reached out and took her arm, "Your Royal Highness, we have to go, now."

Only then did the pain register, as Haldron's hand came away smeared with blood.

"You've been shot," he said, the blood in his face draining away.

Now it was Sabé's turn to say, "Yes, we have to go." And she took off, away from the terrible drumming beat of war. She could do nothing for Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan, in there. Panaka's men came behind her, flanking.

Sabé's hearing had returned, she led them away from the place where she sensed the most droid activity, in the foyer next to the main doors, which did not pose a threat to either party. Instead they took the stairs up to the second level, hid themselves behind the great pillars and took out nine droids on the first rounds of firing.

"Your aim is getting slightly better," Sabé said to Haldron, who looked shocked and delighted at the same time. They ran past the debris of the droids and headed to the next floor.

"And your arm is still bleeding, Your Royal Highness," he said, determined to ruin her fun.

"How improper of me," Sabé replied, "I didn't know that engineers were recruited to be soldiers, Haldron west."

"They weren't," Haldron said, "I volunteered to come and Captain Panaka was only too happy to oblige me."

"Why did you volunteer?" Sabé asked.

When she looked over at him his blush had crept up even to his ears, and she knew. Despite all her previous opinions about the man Sabé now felt only warmth. Something else they shared, she thought, what would Obi-Wan call it, _the pangs of disprized love?_Maybe they had both unknowingly dispatched a White Tatooine desert spider to the great beyond.

"It's Rabé, isn't it?" Sabé asked.

"That obvious?" but he kept his eyes from hers, "Well, I thought maybe if I were here somehow, she would be a least a bit safer. And I know there's someone else. Still – I can't just do nothing. I can't leave her, all alone."

The three droids on the stairwell had only two other arriving for back up, and the team quickly dispatched them.

"This shouldn't be right," Haldron said, "there should be more."

"Hush a moment," Sabé said and tuned her ears, and heard the gathered flurry of noise a floor above them.

"They must have found Padme, and the Captain. Hurry!"

And they bounded up the gleaming marble stairs of the palace, heading for the throne room. The hammering of Sabé's heart had changed from exhilaration to fear in a single instant.

She willed her legs to pump faster.

_Hurry, hurry, hurry, or we will be too late._

Sabé had outstripped the rest of the team by a good ten feet when she saw the figure of the Nemodian standing before Captain Panaka and Padmé, with what seemed like the regiment of droidekas and a few rolling units that had much bigger guns.

No one was hurt.

Fear dissipated into a bright, dazzling joy, and Sabé threw all her will into her voice, willing it to work, willing the Nemodian to believe her.

"Viceroy!" Sabé cried, and watched all faces turn. Behind her the rest of the team had caught up, and even from her distance Sabé could see Rabé's eyes widen, staring behind and beside her at Haldron.

Sabé paused for effect. She could not resist. Her robes settled about her legs, and she held her head up high, imaging the figure of Padmé in all her steely defiance, and wished with every cell in her body that her words might be true.

"Your occupation here has ended!"

With two practiced movements, she felled the droids flanking Nute Gunray. Sabé waited only long enough to see his bulbous eyes widen in recognition before she took off down the hallway.

"Well done!" said Haldron, running behind her, "I think it worked!"

Indeed they heard what sounded like the whole contingent of droids rushing after them. Bright blasts flew overhead.

"I know it's working," Sabé said, "run!"

They rounded the corner and ducked behind the marble pillars while emptying every last cartridge on the droids. One after another the brown droids fell, clangling to the floor like puppets who had their strings cut, droning dischordantly in their mechanical voices. Sabé kept expecting to see the quadripeds rolling after but did not spot a single one.

"Where are the others, Haldron?" Sabé shouted through the sounds of the fire fight, but when she turned to look at Haldron, she had her answer. They had missed the blind spot, thinking their opposition came only from behind. But down the other set of hallways the four droids were almost upon them, gears whirring incredibly fast. The floor shook with their progress.

Over Haldron's shoulder Sabé saw rolling quadripeds assembling into battle positions. She did not pause to think, only shoved Haldron hard enough that he fell to the ground. She stepped over him, brought herself to her full height as to have clean sights on the droids. Sabé could feel the last remaining blasts from the droidekas whizzing past, slowed, almost droning, like a bee that strayed too close to her ear.

She dropped into a crouch, pulling out the cartridges concealed in her high boots, filled with small splatter bullets containing that blue plasma, which was a gift from Genle, and snapped them onto her blasters. A gun in each hand she fired at the first pair of droids, saw them shudder and spark even as she took sight on the next pair and fired again.

And then she too was on the ground.

Sabé tried to get up, but could not. There was pain somewhere in the region of her heart.

From a long distance away, Sabé saw Haldron's flushed face come into view. His mouth moved but she could not understand. The pain in her arm faded. It had gotten very cold. But there were no blasts, so she must have taken down the droids. They were safe.

Someone was breathing in ragged, broken gasps.

"You should tell Rabé how you feel," Sabé tried to say, but her mouth disobeyed her, it was full of something warm. And then what she could feel was something entirely new, not of the floor she lay on, or the hand of Haldron West, gripping hers so tight it left bruises. She only felt a great emptiness under her back, and heard the roar of that wind, blowing through the empty places of the world.


	14. Heart of One Beloved

A/N: Sorry about all the angst in this chapter... but... I have to say: Always wanted to write some angst!

* * *

**Chapter 13: The Heart of One Beloved**

_You touch so blissfully because the caress preserves, _

_Because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;_

_Because underneath it you feel pure duration._

_So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace._

_-Rilke, Second Elegy_

In Theed Palace work went on despite what sounded like the whole of Theed celebrating outside, hollering in the streets. Doctor Amadine Koos, medic first class, shook her head at the noise. It was almost better during the invasion, at least then the sick and injured could rest in relative peace.

"Will you go and yell at them for me, please, Captain," she said to a very dusty Captain Panaka, who stood immediately, battle-frown already forming on his face. She noted that one of his sleeves was ripped, and there was a burn forming on his left cheek bone, raising itself into a scarlet welt. Panaka the impeccable, they used to call him. He wasn't now.

She touched his arm as he passed her, and saw the guilt sitting on his shoulders, his incipient grief.

"You should rest, Captain, or at least go look after your men. Go find your family. The girl will still be here when you return. I promise."

He frowned at her, but she had seen that look enough times to know it as acquiescence. The Captain of the Guard was then heard roaring outside in the courtyard for a good minute, after which all fell quiet. Question the man's methods if you must, Amadine thought, but he always managed to get the job done.

One of her nurses tugged at her elbow, and she turned to see that the young Jedi had finally risen from his seat by the one who had died. He had been in that position ever since the body had been brought in almost an hour ago.

Amadine watched him open a small knife and cut off the long braid that hung down his shirt with two swift hacks. His eyes were dry, but Amadine knew shock when she saw it, and whatever else was said about them, Jedis were not exempt from grief. One could not deny, even after years of training, the part of you that refused to be taught, the part that still feared the dark and the end of all things.

The young Jedi gently tucked the long braid of hair under the older one's interlaced fingers, and staggered out of the small side room had had been set as a temporary morgue.

Amadine walked toward him, determined to make him sit and take a cup of hot chocolate if it was the last thing she did. Then she saw him stop by the bed of a girl who had been brought in after him, the girl with the short stubbles of hair whose stretcher had been followed by Captain Panaka and a slew of other young men and women, all of whom she had to stop at the door.

If the young Jedi could have gotten any paler, he would have. Amadine watched as he approached the bed, his steps shaky, his hand outstretched.

"No, no no no, please," she heard him whisper, the first words he's spoken since he arrived.

She saw the love so clear and vulnerable in his face that she wanted to turn away, for no one should see, on the face of a stranger, such tender things exposed to the cruel air. But thirty years she had been a doctor; she did not turn aside. Instead she took his arm and seated him in a chair before he could fall down.

He turned to look at her, blue eyes empty.

"She is still alive, master Jedi," Amadine said gently. Her heart hurt for him, as the hope began to war with the sadness in his face, even as he tried to gather the shreds of self-possession around him.

"But she's so cold," he said, touching the girl's hand.

"To tell you the truth, I don't even know how she survived. A man was here who saw her take a blast directly to the heart. She pushed him out of the way, he said; she saved many lives."

He made a mirthless noise, "Yes, that sounds like something she would do."

He was regaining control of himself, she thought. The pieces of his armor was coming back together in her presence. He sat straighter, swallowed, and cleared his throat to control his voice.

"And what is her prognosis, Doctor?" He said.

"She's a miracle," Amadine replied, "and she is stable, but we can't wake her. It's as if her body had shut down in order to heal itself."

"I see," he said, and put his hand on the girl's hand, which was bandaged from an old wound. There was still a lost look in his eyes.

Amadine had an idea. She took her stethoscope off her neck, where it sat more as a badge of authority than an instrument of diagnosis, since machines took care of so much now. She offered the earpieces to the young man. He moved slowly, as if in a dream, but placed the device in his ears.

Amadine chose a spot left of the sternum where the blaster hadn't singed the skin to a bright, angry red, and laid the bell of the stethoscope against the girl's heart.

There was no reaction in his face in those first moments when the faint, regular beat filtered through, intimate and undeniable. But then Amadine felt, rather than saw, the change in the room as he gave up that terrible fear inside him. It felt like the scent of thaw on winter morning that heralds the sun. Such was the power, to hear the heart of one's beloved, she thought.

Amadine saw the glint of a tear catch on the edge of his eyes and fall. With a last hand on his shoulder, she drew the curtains around the bed and left them.

* * *

For a long time, the void was empty beneath her feet, until it seemed to Sabé that she stood upon snow. She looked down, and there were her feet, still in the tall boots of her battle dress. So she would be Queen Amidala's decoy, even to this afterlife.

The thought gave her no distress, dying. After all it seemed that she was already over the threshold, upon the other side. In the cold, clear air there was still little to be felt, standing in the powdery cold bank of snow, brilliant white, stretched as far as she could see, ceaseless under a cobalt blue sky.

There was no sun anywhere upon the sky, though everything glowed. When Sabé looked down again, marveling at her own feet, she found a set of footprints next to her, as of a person who had walked her way and passed by her while she stood there, lost in thought. The feet were larger, and the imprint was deeper, the stride longer. A tall man, striding leisurely, had left this imprint of his path in the snow. He was going the opposite way

Sabé began to follow the tracks back to where they came from. It seemed imperative that she did not go where the man had gone, but retraced his way, back to the beginning. The wind began to blow. She walked until the cold stung at her arms and legs like a thousand needles.

Then Sabé lifted her head and looked about her, taking shallow breaths as the air stung her lungs, and realized that the snowy field around her was scored with countless tracks, all headed in the opposite direction as her own. Her legs felt like lead weights, and at her next step she stumbled and fell to her knees, stirring up a pile of white powder, which flowed up around her like smoke.

Then two strong hands clamped on her shoulders, and hauled her to her feet. And Qui-Gon's voice, that same wry tone, came in upon her ears.

"Stand up, little ghost," he said, his voice was muffled, far away yet near, so near she thought that she had heard him in her mind.

"Take care of Obi-Wan for me, will you?" Qui-Gon said, and the voice was full of emotion, both sadness and a calm, brilliant joy that Sabé could not name.

"He was like a son to me," the ghost of Qui-Gon said in her ear, and there was a cracking noise like great trees splitting from weight of the winter snow, and the pain of her true body returned, and Sabé felt her heart burn as if a winter storm howled inside it, sending jagged ice into its chambers.

Sabé thought she cried out, but the air was still and empty of voices. A moment, when the pain receded to only a dull ache, and Sabé opened her eyes, for the second time in her life, on a world she thought she had left.

The air smelled of antiseptic. The curtains around her ward were black swathes in the night's blue shadow, and asleep, slumped over his chair, with this head resting sideways on her bed, was Obi-Wan Kenobi. He had turned his head from her in sleep, so Sabé could see by the jagged cuts where his Padawan braid had been severed, and not with great care.

She remembered that familiar deep voice speaking out of the cold, and guessed what must have happened. She imagined Obi-Wan's grief, and how far he had to go to be composed again, to climb back into the skin of a Jedi master. She knew that no matter how much he had wanted to be detached and stand impassive, that Obi-Wan was a passionate man, that he had been passionately devoted to his master, and because he had always hidden the inner effulgence of his emotion from others, he must also stand to bear the passion of his grief alone.

"Take care of Obi-Wan for me," Qui-Gon had said.

"But how?" she whispered, "when he won't let me?"

Then, Sabé realized, as Obi-Wan's hands flexed on hers, that he had covered her cold fingers with his own as he slept.

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes.

_Whatever face he showed to the world,_ Sabé thought_, I know his soul, which no mask could cover, not even the mask of control and restraint that had grown into him, into his very bones. I know that in his heart, he cares. He cares desperately; he can do naught but care._

And it was for his heart that she would try to care for him in return; for it was his heart that knew and did not pity her love.

Sabé felt ungainly, but she managed to peel off one of her own numerous blankets, and settle it across Obi-Wan's shoulders, which must soon bear so much responsibility. It probably was unmannerly to take advantage of his sleeping, weakened state and plant a kiss upon his head, but Sabé was no state dignitary, no monarch, who must observe the rituals and articles of war.

"You were like a son to him, you know," she said to the sleeping Obi-Wan. Then Sabé took his hand again under the covers, closed her fingers around his calloused palm, his fingers preternaturally warm as always. And holding his hand, Sabé fell back into a sleeping trance, as a diving bird pierces the surface of the great ocean.

* * *

When Obi-Wan woke, the bright clear yellow light of the Naboovian sun was coming through every window. Yet even at his first breath he felt as though he had passed a gate behind him, never to be regained, that thtere was a point of equilibrium in his past that had been materially altered. Some deep, basic, molecular changed had occurred in him, and its effect was making the cascade through his veins.

There was still a pain in his chest, a pain that did not go away. His balance was off, Obi-Wan thought. So the world was this: consistently pulling the rug out, readjusting the weights, the worries, the balance of life and death. And even though his heart recoiled at the feeling of such imbalance, he thought it fitting.

The world was changed. Qui-Gon was dead.

He remembered Sabé saying how she had wanted, more than all the wonders of the world, to be still. It was grief, he realized. Though she did not remember her parents or their deaths it was a kind of grief for them nonetheless. It was a grief he shared now; the grief of knowing how the world moves on.

There was no possibility of avoiding heartbreak, he thought; there was no getting away from it.

There was a certain peace in that knowledge.

Once he had calmed, long after the grey-eyed doctor with her gaze of mercury left the room, Obi-Wan realized something about Sabé that had never occurred to him before. Sometime around his own fifteenth birthday, Obi-Wan had not slept for half a week on a mission, spending the long nights plotting, worrying, hearing Qui-Gon's deep nasal whistle while he slept. That was the trip when a badly executed block had broken three of his fingers, snapped all at once in a clean yet sickening crack. Back on the transport, infection and fever had set in his blood. Obi-Wan was delirious with it and remembered nothing until two days later, waking in the comforting convalescent rooms of the Jedi temple. No bacta needed, one of the healers had said to him. His body merely needed the quiet to repair itself.

"You were in a force-induced healing trance," Qui-Gon had told him later that day, completely normal procedure, no tender inquiries, no further questions, pleased, for Qui-Gon too hated to be in the infirmary. He did not like anything that kept him land-bound, slow-moving. Always in motion, that was Qui-Gon Jinn.

Obi-Wan bit his cheek as the terrible longing swelled through him, filling his heart, choking him.

But through the maelstrom of unbidden emotion he called the point of significance, that was the realization that Sabé too, was in that state of force-induced trance. He had reached out to her through the force, and found it there, like a opalescent dome enclosing her body, glowing like a swift running brook that wove itself trough the air around her. She would be well, he thought, closing his eyes and reading her vital signs through the force. She was a force-sensitive. How could he have missed it?

Last night, Obi-Wan thought that he should leave her, for he was no company for anyone, comatose or awake. As it was, he had found all the blankets he could, and wrapped her in them. It was peaceful to be near her. He had fallen asleep at her side, comforted by the faint sense of her beating heart.

For a second yesterday he thought that the would not be able to stand it, if in addition to his master, he would also lose Sabé, who yearned to see so much more of the world, who had so much of her heart to give. It was a dangerous idea, he realized now, to make claims on what was fair, and what was not. Fate had no concern; war had no sympathy, no pity, no justice.

But she was still here.


	15. The Bond Between

A/N: Ansibles are the invention of Ursula K. LeGuin and Shevek; I borrow it here with many thanks. We are moving toward finish and there is only one more chapter to go! Many thanks to all my reviewers for your encouragement, especially **River Winters,** for your persistent interest, even when I wasn't feeling quite so motivated! Please read and review :)

* * *

**Chapter 14: The Bond Between**

_What more can you share_

_Than your whole self, your whole life,_

_All the nights and all the days?_

_- _Ursula K. LeGuin, _The Dispossessed_

When Sabé woke completely out of her trance in the midmorning, the chair by her bed was empty. In the days following, it was filled by many others. Saché came, smiling so hard that she was crying. She wore her black eye like a a badge of honor.

"You look like a ghost, my friend," she said, eyes widening as she sat by Sabé's bedside.

"So I've been told," Sabé replied. She was still easily tired, and some minutes of the night when unwanted thoughts would ambushed her, and she felt her heart gallop and trip like an ungainly horse.

"Here's the thing about nearly dying," she told Saché, "now I simply know that life is precious. But I still don't know how better to live it."

But first Sabé went to the funeral of Qui-Gon Jinn. She had expected something somber, something grand, but she did not expect the music.

First the Gungan musicians played, a wailing melody out of deep forest pools, out of caverns in dark water. And then there was someone from the Jedi Temple, a female Knight, her skin patterned as wildly as an orchid in full bloom, and she played a song of mourning upon an instrument Sabé had never seen, a music so full of emotion that it made every particle in Sabé's mind spring awake. For she played both in the force, and in the air.

Grief, and peace; emotion and calm one over taking the other, the possibility of transcendental whirlwind in the utter silence. The music weaved on, without accompaniment, as the soul must walk, singly, through that field of snow to the edge of the forest. And it was there, in the middle of life and death, music and silence, confronted with the irremovable truth that she loved Obi-Wan Kenobi, that Sabé felt her strength returning to her.

It was as if the notes had struck some chord within the quiescent midichlorians in her cells, and confronted with yet another intractable challenge they sprang into life. For there was so much to do still, in the meantime. Love of a man was not life itself. There was work and friends and all the planets of the three thousand galaxies. In all the years of her waiting, there would be another life.

* * *

"I have a question for you, Your Royal Highness," Obi-Wan said without raising his head. It was the night of the great celebrations, and he was holed instead in an adjoining tech room, fiddling helplessly at a couple of datapads. He felt her arrive, like a humming that materialized at the corner of his mind. He felt it even before he heard her steps.

The magnifying apparatus extended in front of his right eye. Obi-Wan pushed it aside, and blinked at the distance that opened between them without the telescoping lens. Sabé only stood at the edge of the door, but tonight the space seemed immeasurable. Space, which had ever seemed knowable, traversable, passable – tonight seemed impossibly vast, an unimaginable gulf.

Obi-Wan felt that chill crawl up his spine, of premonition, perhaps, or mere anxiety. He had a long time to think on loss of late. Some nights, Qui-Gon's death seemed so preventable, a matter of mere of meters. If only Obi-Wan had been a bit faster, reacted quicker, if only he had covered that small space between him and Qui-Gon ... and now this small distance hung between them, a distance of life and death.

He looked up and found Sabé frozen in the doorway. Her hesitant eyes found his. "It's _me, _Obi-Wan," she looked as if she feared for his sanity, "It's Sabé."

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone," Obi-Wan replied, "that I've got their real queen down here, and it's a decoy they're fêteing upstairs. Now, I've run into a problem regarding machines. Can you help me?"

"You're completely daft," she said, "you know that, Obi-Wan?"

Her old combative tone had returned as she stood there, hand on hip, scowling at his levity. For the first time in days Obi-Wan felt a smile pulling at his lips, relaxing his face. The feeling bordered on pain.

"Alright, then, Master Jedi," Sabé smiled at him, "How can I help you?" She moved into the pool of light and Obi-Wan saw that she was bare-headed, her hair a downy auburn fanning out on her well-shaped head. A gown wrapped her around the waist, came to a high neck, and flowed off her shoulders in a fine lawn material that caressed her arms. The color of it was a pale, mossy green, with darker trim at the waist and neck. The glow of light slid across the burnished fabric, which shone like a river on a clear summer's morn, every particle dancing with gold. A slim belt of liquid silver hung about her waist. Obi-Wan saw the line of her profile, the shadows of her throat, and caught a faint scent of lilies. He found himself stammering.

"You… you look nice," he finally managed.

"Oh shut up," she blushed, "Padme had this one especially made because my new scars would show on the usual Handmaiden's dress, which would have been unseemly, she said. You should see them up there, Obi-Wan; _everybody _wants to dance. I think even Captain Panaka's dancing, with his wife of course. My feet are killing me. _This _is much more interesting than dancing."

She bent away from him to examine the contents of his desk, "Trying to sync up two datapads, Obi-Wan? And you have the new, long-rangers. Why? Comlinks are easier, especially if you're on the same planet. You and Anakin don't plan to be on opposite sides of the universe, do you?"

He chose not to correct her. "Say that we were," he said, "say that something happened, so these two datapads were scattered to different ends of the universe. Can they still get a message across, on a secure channel? Across all of space?"

Sabé gathered up the flimsy material of her sleeves and pinned them to her shoulders, so that Obi-Wan could see the scar high on her left arm, closed over, but still a bright, angry red. She rubbed her hands together. "Only the hard questions from you, Obi-Wan. We have ansible technology already, which will give you simultaneous transmission. That part's easy; it's software – we simply route the signal through an ansible tower. But what you need most are two identical crystals, rare ones, that can transmit vibrations at the same frequency, all the way across the universe."

Sabé sat there. Beside her Obi-Wan perched, feeling himself becoming more and more transparent as she sank into thought. Her eyes were fixed on the blinking datachips before her, and then, to his surprise, her hand traveled up and rested beside her ear, as if she was listening to something far away. To his surprise, she removed the diamond studs from her earlobes, and looked at them with a smile spreading across her face.

"Grab me the metal working kit, would you, Obi-Wan?" Sabé asked, never taking her eyes off the bright stones. "It's three steps to your right, lower cabinet, third shelf, clear plastic bin."

"What are you planning to do with those?" Obi-Wan asked, pointing to the diamonds, which scattered a constellation of lights over the surface of the table.

"They are a thank-you gift from Padmé; something different for each of us. From the Queen's Jewels, can you imagine? Eirtaé almost had a panic attack, she was so caught between the breach of protocol and the excitement. Near to flawless as you can get, this distance from the Rim diamond traders. They're going to be absolutely perfect."

"I can't have you doing that," Obi-Wan tried to protest. But she had already flipped a small soldering mask over her face.

"Hush!" A command queenly as any, and Obi-Wan subsided as Sabé turned on the dazzling, blue-rimmed flame. She soldered the silver-platinum base and attached the diamond to the datachip at the transmission portal. Obi-Wan hardly dared breathe, watching the curve of her neck as she bent over her project. Less than fifteen minutes later she had moved onto the second datapad, rearranging, soldering, transforming.

Obi-Wan was content to watch Sabé work. The small hands that maneuvered knowledgeably, powerfully within a Shield generator were here deft, light, and precise. He felt again that bright pool, which he had noticed the first time he had ever met her, in a ship hurtling across space, millions of miles away from where they stood. As Sabé tinkered, hummed, and rewired the circuitry, Obi-Wan fell into a light meditation. The pool of silence opened around them into some quiet cave, in which Obi-Wan thought he could hear the echos of all possible futures, his and hers, and that of the living world. He thought he heard a child cry for her mother, in the deep darkness.

"Look!" Sabé had finished. Grinning from ear to ear, she wrote on one of the datapads and showed him how the writing appeared on the other pad, simultaneously. Obi-Wan focused on the nearest clock and found that an hour had passed. In the distance the music from the party flowed on, and laughter reached them where they sat in silence. Obi-Wan took the datapads, each of them the size of a woman's palm, and tried it out for himself.

"You can't be sure that the long-distance will work until you've actually tried it," Sabé said, "but I'm pretty certain it will do the trick. The diamonds might also come in useful the next time you are stuck on a Hutt-controlled rim planet and need something to bargain for your life."

"Thank you," Obi-Wan said, looking into her smile, marveling at her guileless generosity. He wished he had a better word for it, a better word for this sense of gratitude. But as it was he could only say again, "thank you, Sabé."

* * *

They strolled out into the garden, dimly lit by starlight and the lights spilling from the ballroom. The night air stirred around them, warm and enveloping, like an animal in her sleep. Obi-Wan stopped Sabé by a great ginko tree growing in the middle of a clearing; its fan-shaped leaves were still distinguishable in the darkness.

"Sit down with me?" he said.

"Why?"

"Because it's my last night here, on Naboo," said Obi-Wan, "And I have something to show you."

"Alright." She sat, tucking her legs under her, and adjusted her dress. "What is it, Obi-Wan?"

"Listen with me," said Obi-Wan, "listen to the night."

Sabé closed her eyes. She heard the faint ripple of leaves upon the tree, the faint sounds of celebration from the nearby building. She heard her own breathing, and faintly, Obi-Wan's long breaths. She felt her hair stirring on her head. She also heard that sound which she always hears in the silence, that high, ranging pitch of bright silver, piercing through all the seconds of the world, which hang upon it like clusters of pearls.

For long minutes Sabé merely breathed and listened, and allowed for the thoughts to empty from her mind. There was an ease in it that she had not felt before, which had to do with the utter stillness and the solidity of Obi-Wan.

Then She sank deeper. It was like moving from the crests of waves into the depths of the blue-gray ocean, for the lights seemed to have gone out, and sounds were few but magnified. There was a persistent, low rhythm in it, and Sabé's eyes, though closed, seemed to have vision and her covered ears heard as though from far away where they resided with her body.

Obi-Wan's voice came, carrying through the particles of the force.

"I'm here, Sabé," he said, inside her mind, "I've induced a force-trance from your meditation to lead you here. This is the entry way, an antechamber. What you need now is to create a room within this interim space, a place where your mind might dwell within the river of the force. Can you visualize a place, a place of your own?"

Before Sabé could even think - or do anything that she normally considered thinking - mountains and spaces of vast sky formed out of the dark, blue-green ocean, sculpting themselves into snowy peaks and deep ravines, and she saw every rock spring into being in a flurry of dust and the shrubs and plants wedging their way between the great stones upon the lower slopes.

Then the mountains moved away from her, and under her feet she felt the icy snow meltwater of the swift great river. And then she was upon the opposite bank, barefoot ona beach of sand and round stones, warm from the sun. Old trees opened their canopies above her, leaving her in shadow. All was majesty before her. And the clouds and mountains reflected themselves into the river water. A bird sang, unseen.

Beside her, standing not in his Jedi robes but a blue shirt and loose trousers, also barefoot, was Obi-Wan. He looked astonished.

"Is this alright, do you think?" Sabé said, though it was not like speaking, exactly.

"My stars," he said, looking at his hands, "you can see me."

"Am I not supposed to?"

He swallowed. "Not really, no."

Sabé shrugged, and felt hair tickling her cheek.

"You see," Obi-Wan said, "here we take the form we take in our dreams."

"Why did you bring me here, Obi-Wan?" Sabé said.

"Bring you here? You brought me here," said Obi-Wan, "this is a sanctuary of sorts. A place you might explore, take refuge in, a place you can always return to, even when the world is a mess. This is the center of your mind, in the force."

"What does yours look like, Obi-Wan?"

He held out his hand, "let me show you."

They fell through rock and dirt and water, and then were standing once more. The air tasted different. Sabé held tighter to Obi-Wan's hand, but heard him whisper, "open your eyes."

The sun was setting on a field of golden wheat. Great trees stood in the middle of the field, and off in the distance were rolling hills, green with new grass. A soft wind blew across, ruffling the stalks of corn. Upon the air, great birds migrated on the upward draft.

"This was my home," Obi-Wan said, "the home of my childhood, before I came to the temple on Couruscant. On that field there I had spent long summer afternoons with my brother, Owen."

"It's so warm here," Sabé said, "so bright. Is it usually a place from childhood that one chooses, Obi-Wan?"

"Almost always," he said, "Master Qui-Gon told me that it's because some part of our mind recalls the feeling of being deeply loved, even in the extremity of our youth and that the mark of love stays with us, is carried within us, that it becomes the core around which we grow into ourselves. You cannot choose the place. Your heart has chosen it."

She pointed in the distance, where a small low-roofed house stood amidst the field, "what is that over there?"

Obi-Wan frowned. "It is a house," he said, and sighed. "It is _my_ house."

He looked away from her, "I see it even in my dreams. Somedays I go in there and look out of the window and all I see is a vast desert stretching for endless miles under a cruel sun. I am in a hut with scant furniture, an old greying man alone in his house of stones. Other days I walk through the same doors into that house and see not a desert, but green islands in blue water. Instead of silence I hear the echo of a young girl's laughter in the air, and the house is large, elegant, full of light and tall wooden beams. In the distance I hear the humming of fantastic machines upon the air and a brisk river, running."

Sabé saw pain on his face, when he spoke of this second house. "What do you think it means?"

"It is my future," Obi-Wan said, "it is a glimpse of two paths that I should never have seen."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't look at me with those eyes, Sabé. I have accepted my life." He looked at her, then away, but took her hand.

They stood still in the fields a while, as the soft breeze took away the pain of a future that could not be. Sometime later Obi-Wan said, "You know, Master Qui-Gon fell in love once."

"He did?"

"Yes. He was in love with Tahl, the Temple Archivist, for the longest time. They had been crechelings together. And though my Master seemed always to be a rulebreaker, here he was confronted with a passion that he felt certain he could not handle. So to maintain some semblance of control he stuck to the Code, as did she. They not tell each other their feelings until very late. But it was only the admission; they had not time to sort through the whole emotional tangle that had been their thirty-some-year unspoken love . They meant to, of course, but an assignment got in the way.

"I remember his face, the day we got word that she had been kidnapped, and I remember the look on it when he almost killed her murderer in cold blood, after we tracked him down. But he stopped himself. She was already dead. And after that he was a changed man, though he did not fall. The dark had touched him; more than that, he had reached for it. It was a sadness that never left.

"I had always taken what happened to mean that if you bury it deep and never speak of it, falling in love won't necessarily wreak this sort of destruction –_ there is no passion, there is peace_. I was sure that passionless solitude was achievable. For the other option was to end up like Qui-Gon, heart-sick and touched with the madness of rage.

"But lately I've been reconsidering all of it, Sabé. I think now that Qui-Gon should have admitted to Tahl long ago that he loved her. Think what they could have had, with those twenty, thirty years? The council wouldn't have approved, certainly, but Qui-Gon didn't care, and neither did Tahl. They might not have children, or a house full of plants and pets and pictures, but –"

"They would have had the bond," she said softly.

"Yes," Obi-Wan said, and all around them were the golden fields of autumn, "yes, they would have had the bond."

* * *

The morning that the Jedi departed, Sabé returned to her room and found one of the datapads sitting on her bed. As she looked, a brief message sketched itself across the screen.

**_My Dearest Sabé: do you believe that a bond between two people can reach across the empty desolation between worlds, and even traverse the dark between two distant stars?_**

Without hesitation Sabé picked up a pen and wrote, decisively, **_Yes._**


	16. Nowhere to Remain

A/N: I can't believe it's over! My deep thanks to all those who reviewed, and read; you kept me going. Really, you did. The fragment of poem - and the story's title - from Rainer Maria Rilke's "First Elegy," of his _Duino Elegies, _which you should try._  
_

***For those who have been following the story - I'd love to hear from you! Please take a minute and tell me what you liked and didn't like.***

* * *

**Epilogue: Nowhere To Remain**

_Is it not time_

_To free ourselves from the beloved_

_Even as we, trembling, endure the loving?_

**-**Rilke, First Elegy**  
**

Sister Sabé was old by the time I joined the Nunnery in Ranneth. Not ancient, certainly, but no longer middle-aged, and she was often ill. The door to her kuti was almost always closed, and none of the novices saw her for days at a time, not at morning meditation, or the afternoon service, or even mealtimes.

She had been Abbess once, years ago, but gave up the position because of her increasing bouts of illness. When I arrived I only knew that she was well-respected, deferred to, given the most comfortable kuti – which, in all fairness, wasn't saying much among the Sisters of Ailla. But it was her own space, where she could shut the door and stay in her room for as long as she liked, and everyone else tiptoed past it in fear of disturbing her meditation, or her sleep. And we, the novices, were still too well-behaved to do anything else but inch past that shut door; no one had the nerve to knock, and ask her in person if all the stories were true.

Ranneth was a small village nestled into the foothills of the Jinarres Mountains of Naboo. Rain came every week without fail during the year, and there was a three-month stretch from April to July when it would rain without stop. Taking advantage of the weather the Sisters conducted their annual Rains Retreat for the duration of one hundred days, coinciding with the endless downpour.

It was to be my first Rains. Indeed it was said to be the test of a novice, to withstand the hundred days' silence, the long sitting meditations that connected night to morning, the week-long beginning fast.

The evening before it began I had gone out into the courtyard, the small exercising ground maintained by the sisters. The night air had the heft of dampness, and the gray flagstones gleamed faintly, wetly, reflecting half-fingernails to the moon. A desolate loneliness fell on me; I sneezed, sniffling not entirely from the cold I'd gotten sleeping in the thin blankets, and tried to compose myself. Right on cue the working remnants of my head presented me with fantastic visions of the soft pillows of home, the warm hearth, the holovid. None of it would go out of my head. I sneezed again, and that's when a window opened. The window was not transparisteel but the old glass-hybrid that had been cheaper back in the Dark Days. It slid back from the nearest room on my right, and I heard the Sister Sabé call me by name.

I had never seen her before, Sister Sabé. She waved an impatient hand at me.

"Come on, Novice. Come inside."

Sister Sabé held the door open for me. Her hand was very small, blue-veined, but still well-shaped and strong. There was a callous on her thumb and middle finger, and the latter was stained black with ink. She was taller than I had expected for a Naboovian, darker as well. Her hair was shorn, as the custom, and the grey stubbles caught he lamplight, glittering.

She motioned for me to go into her room, and I could see she had some trouble trying to rotate her neck to speak to me, since she looked at me incessantly from the edges of her large brown eyes. The ring around her irises had faded to blue with age, but she must have been very striking in youth, in the way that delicate features can mingle and form a face of surprising strength. The broad forehead sloped down to a short, pointed nose. Wide brows, still thick, emphasized the deep eyes which sat like two hololights atop the sharp cheekbones. She had the face of a small bird of prey, sharp, dignified, and proud.

A rumor circulating about Sister Sabé to account for her non-presence said that she was in fact an Attained One, and that she was always meditating her way into the blissful realms of oceanic wisdom and peace, and needed no food or water for days on end. But I was not to have much time to reflect on how her first words embodied the Ideal of Perfect Enlightenment, for a hot cup of tea was thrust under my nose, and the scent of it stung and made my eyes water.

"The best tea from Coruscant," Sister Sabé said, lifting a slow smile to my incredulous grimace at the taste of the stuff. It was color of mud and tasted vile beyond imagining – but I barely managed to choke it down before my sinuses steamed open as if commanded.

A handkerchief was proffered. I accepted gratefully and blew into it. The headachey feeling disappeared entirely. Sister Sabé smiled at my surprise. She had a disarmingly sweet smile, for one who seemed so sharp. Crinkles fanned out in wheels from her eyes, rippled like a wave over the surface of her face. It was as if she had been smiling that same way all her life.

Her robes were the standard stone-wash gray, patched over many times through the years, brown patches for the first five years, blue for the next ten, deep green for the decade after that and deep purple for whatever remained. Through the thin fabric of a purple square I caught the shadow of a pointy elbow. She bade me sit, graciously, that though her face was crafted to shine in concentration, in intensity of joy and sorrow, for the moment there was only a relaxed welcome, a serene slowness that for her probably came with age. For in the lines of her shoulders she still showed a faded copy of the wiry strength of years past, fast reflexes and snap and verve. Age had softened her manners, as long peace of weather settles the face of a lake, to reflect.

"Make your self comfortable, Novice," she said.

I settled myself down on the visitor cushion, and looked about. The room was something of a disappointment. No exotic items collected from distant galaxies were allowed to the past Abbess, no fancy rugs or decorations, only the standard pallet (same as the novices') lying in a corner, three blankets – blue with white patches – stacked neatly in a pile with a flat pillow on top. A poem was tacked onto the wall. The spiky handwriting read:

_Is it not time_

_To free ourselves from the beloved_

_Even as we, trembling, endure the loving?_

_As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension_

_So that, released, it travels farther._

_For there is nowhere to remain._

More interestingly, there was a collection of irregularly-shaped stones on the window sill, and a low-kneeling table with a stack of blank parchment and a stack of filled ones, and one very old, worn datapad. Sister Sabé saw my incredulous look at the paper.

"Ancient stuff, isn't it? You don't see much of it. But there's permanence to the feeling of ink on paper. A sense of _There. I've said it._"

"Is this for the Abbey, what you are writing?"

She laughed merrily, a strong laugh. "No, it's not my collected sayings and wisdom if that's what you're implying," she said, "It is my memoir – not even that. These are only notes."

"May I?"

She handed me a few pages.

We became good friends over that Rains Retreat, Sister Sabé and I. While I held quiet under the constraint of silence it was her company in the evenings that was my true education. Always over a cup of tea she would inspect me, and then hand me her notes, to be transcribed onto a datapad. While I typed, she wrote with furrowed brows. And as I read what was contained in these notes I could not help but be astonished at who the sister had been during her life – the people she knew, the things that she had seen and done. I resolved that once the Rains were over I would ask her all the questions about to burst from my lips.

But Sister Sabé would not see the end of that Rains Retreat alive. And the papers were only so many notes, not a narrative. She bequeathed them to me, who could not hope to do them justice – not as a speaker of the truth. So I can only tell lies, and tell her story as I envision it, from what I know of her, from what I can delve from the silences between the spaces of the world.

* * *

For a historical account of Sabé's efforts for the Rebellion during the darkest days of the Empire, the reader may go to my book _A Nunnery in Ranneth: How a Rebel Base Flourished in the Heart of the Galactic Empire. _But this story that you have just read, this story of lovers in a time of war, this is the story that had my heart. This is the story that must remain unfinished. For lack of time, or perhaps for the painfulness of some memories, Sister Sabé never completed her notes about the period between the Invasion of Naboo and her return to the Sisters of Ailla nearly two decades later, after which, due to her extensive participation in rebel activities, the records are restored again.

We have only the bare facts:

Though the records no longer exist, there was extensive communication and correspondence between Sabé and Obi-Wan Kenobi in the decades following their first meeting on Naboo. The correspondence ends with his disappearance at the Rise of the Galactic Empire and the execution order Sixty-six.

Following the outbreak of the war, Senator Amidala's death, and Obi-Wan's disappearance, Sabé can be found in the records of the planet Soccoro, under an alias. After settling there through connections of Dengar Duel of Coruscant, she married one of its prominent smugglers – and rebel sympathizers – Rainer Calrissian. It was said that she was a widow with one infant daughter already by the time she married Rainer. The husband of her first marriage and the parentage of her daughter remain unclear.

Rainer Calrissian and his connections were heavily involved in rebel work; nearly all of their smuggling missions went into building a rebel base in Socorro and elsewhere. Merely two years into his marriage with Sabé, he and others at their compound were attacked by the agents of the Galactic Empire. None were left alive. Sabé had been off-planet at the time, consulting with off-world clients and connections. She returned to find her home in ruins, her husband and friends dead. Her daughter, name unknown, was not listed among the dead; she went missing and was never found. Of Sabé's despair there was no account. But less than a year later she returned to the Nunnery at Ranneth, where the extremely aged Abbess Mabela passed on her title to Sabé, mere days before Mabela died.

Then, slowly, mysteriously, unthinkably, the numbers at Ranneth began to grow. No longer a Nunnery; during the Empire's rule Ranneth became a secret retreat. Those who knew of the brilliant wife of Rainer Calrissian, who spearheaded most of his operations and was tireless in her work to support the rebel cause, began sending stragglers to her. They followed a hidden beam, a homing beacon directed toward Naboo herself, so far within the Empire's grasp that it would have seemed an impossible place. But the Empire had underestimated Naboo; they never thought to look closely, among the mountain retreats of the Naboovian hermits, for a rebel hideout.

The Nunnery of Ranneth became one of the only rebel bases located within the core planets. All those who strayed too close on a mission, who found themselves stuck, had the codes and were told to go for refuge in the mountains of Naboo's outerlands. And, having landed in one of the makeshift helipads hidden among the greening hills, they would find waiting for them a tall, slim woman with closely cropped hair and a pack full of mechanical supplies, who stayed on to work on their craft even as she sent them down the river to the Nunnery itself for refreshment and sleep.

It was in this endeavor that the lovers met again, once more and only once. In the logs Sabé kept of those pilots who came to her, seeking respite, there was a brief entry under **7 BBY: **_**Obi-Wan Kenobi, of Tatooine. Shield repairs and hyperdrive tune-up. September 4-6**._

And last night, after writing this I remembered that in the days of the new Jedi Order, a woman came once, a woman with flaming red hair. I remember she walked arm in arm with Sister Sabé in the garden, weeping together. And after she left, Sister Sabé began to write.

* * *

It rained steadily and without cease for eighty days on that Rains Retreat. On the eighty-first, the sky was clear, a glowing blue. White clouds were thickly stacked, like cities upon the air, and sunlight poured down like cool water. Sister Sabé had a slight cough and so she sat outside that day by the two trees she had planted at the door of the Nunnery many years ago. Now their shade covered the sun and the sky. Even from the windows of the kitchen where I prepared the evening meal, I could see that she was smiling.

That night she died, and the pair of peregrine falcons she kept shrieked and cried from the trees outside the window, then were never seen again. The stray black Labrador that she loved huddled outside her door, whining. And I could have sworn I saw a faint blue light under the thin door, glowing nearly all of night. The next day they found Sister Sabé sitting in the posture of meditation, but with one hand extended, laid open on her right side, as if waiting for someone to take her hand.

So much of that long and rich life is lost to silence. But I wish to end with the sister's own words; a brief fragment discovered among her papers, dated in the year when Obi-Wan Kenobi returned to Naboo once more.

**_He said that couldn't trust anyone. Things were dangerous, secret, hidden. His very existence was a threat that must be eliminated by the Emperor, and by he who had been Anakin. But as we pulled out into the river at night on my watercraft, with the eddies falling in silent folds behind us like curtains drawing close the end of a play, I heard his breathing grow even, deep and smooth. He sliced through the surface of sleep like a blade. And I thought– silly woman that I am – that though he knew he could trust no one, knew it for an absolute fact, I was still in that circle with him, enclosed in an invisible web, even after all these years, even though we have grown old so far from one another. Still here, that bond: delicate as the gossamer web of the White Spider; stronger than chains of durasteel. For some part of him knew that it was safe here; even in these dark and hopeless days, there was safety enough to be vulnerable, to be loved, to be content, in a vessel guided by my hands as we sailed through ocean and night. _**


End file.
